Date:21/11/2002 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2002/11/21/stories/2002112106101100.htm

Other States - Gujarat

Vajpayee, Advani to star in many-tiered campaign

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI NOV. 20. The Bharatiya Janata Party's campaign committee has drawn up a tentative plan for a many-tiered election campaign in Gujarat. While the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, is likely to address about four meetings in the heart of four zonal centres — Ahmedabad, Baroda, Rajkot and Surat — a concerted campaign by the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K.Advani, covering every district has been planned.

Other star campaigners include Murli Manohar Joshi, Sushma Swaraj, Pramod Mahajan, Uma Bharati, Shatrughan Sinha and Vinod Khanna. They are expected to cover about 20 to 25 constituencies each.

Besides, BJP MPs from Gujarat and neighbouring States will focus their energies on villages and `bastis' (habitations). The party's `tribal' leaders, Juel Oram and Babulal Marandi, will be asked to campaign in the `adivasi' belt.

The Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Pramod Mahajan, has already given blanket permission to all party Ministers to remain absent from the ongoing winter session for campaigning in Gujarat.

Answering of questions in Parliament will be done by junior Ministers or others.

Although for the record the party spokesperson, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, said the focus would be on development and the State Government's five-year performance, other party leaders said `Hindutva' was and would be the main issue.

Mr. Malhotra said the party would take up other issues such as ``patriotism versus pseudo-secularism'' (notwithstanding the fact that the VHP leader, Ashok Singhal, has described Mr. Advani as a pseudo-secularist) and ``POTA versus jehadi terrorism''.

He refused to say in which category of terrorism, if any, his party would place the Gujarat massacres. But certainly the Godhra carnage belonged to ``jehadi terrorism''.

The Congress had opposed the POTA and it said that the States ruled by it would not use the powers under it, Mr. Malhotra said. ``We will use this in the campaign and point out that the Congress was not willing to take strong action against terrorists and that POTA was necessary to tackle terrorism,'' he said.