Election Commission Getting a hard time Secular Forces Should behave responsively: Basu Contradictions & Confusions BJP style

Political Correspondent

With elections nearing, the contradictions within the BJP are surfacing. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, in a recent interview to a weekly has said that he feels that it would not have been wise to seek a second trust vote since even that government would not have been stable and fallen before the year was out. On the other hand, most of his top party leaders are saying just the opposite, argung that the President, R.K.Narayanan, should have given the BJP a chance to prove its majority for a second time on the floor of the House. In fact, the Union human resources development minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, said that the President had taken undue time to announce his next step even after the Congress president , Sonia Gandhi, had failed to garner the requisite numbers to form a government. The BJP seems to be incensed with the President for denying the party access to power again but the Prime Minister's admission that he would not have liked to seek a trust vote has nailed the party's common lie; the party was indeed divided on this very issue and actually did not have the numbers to test the strength of this nation's democracy..

The BJP has also accused the President of suggesting an election date after which Rashtrapati Bhavan was forced to issue a rejoinder saying that he had not done anything like that. The BJP was out to prove that the President was taking a ``more active role than necessary'' in the executive functioning of the state and prior to the elections, this could have sinister implications. It is obvious that the BJP wants an early election to cash in on what it feels could be a sympathy wave which makes this accusation even more dangerous; it means serious innuendoes being hurled at the very roots of our democracy with the President being charged with taking a partisan role. Nothing could be more dangerous than this. A government at daggers drawn with the President cannot possibly, by the very nature of its functioning, be doing any good to the nation in the process. A major lesson should be drawn from the problems of governance the BJP way and efforts should be made to ensure that Rashtarpati Bhavan is forced to issue rejoinders to such accusations which have no basis.

The party's stand vis-à-vis the President thus has dangerous ramifications; if the accusations that the BJP is hurling against the highest office of the country are anything to go by, then the forthcoming campaign in the elections is expected to be anything but honest. Leaders of all parties are expecting the election run-up to be dirty and full of slanderous innuendoes and given the BJP and its strategies, the ``swadeshi'' slogan may again be used to its advantage, obviously to be forgotten once the exercise is over. There is a move on the part of the BJP and its allies to release a common manifesto at the national level while ``regional manifestos'' will be given precedence in the making up of state-wise programmes. In Bengal, the Trinamool Congress and the BJP have again said that they will fight the elections together, though whether the internal contradictions between the two parties will obviously not make the going easy.

The CPI(M) has already said that the Congress and the BJP will be treated at par as enemies though there has been no movement away from the basic premise that the Congress, though no less a votary of corruption that the BJP, cannot be seen as having institutionalised communalism as the latter. With the 13 months of BJP rule already having pushed the country to the brink of disaster in terms of breaking the secular thread and consolidating corruption, it is thus time that the people be given a chance to exercise their franchise and root for the secular Third Front which seems to be the only viable alternative in front of them at the moment if the country has to survive.