news details |
|
|
| BJP has lost its support-base because it has lost its moorings | | STARK REALITY | |
RUSTAM
Early Times Story
JAMMU, Feb 18: The J&K unit of the BJP had given the people of Jammu province and all others to understand that it would not allow Union Home Minister P Chidambaram to enter the winter capital on Wednesday. It had taken this stand on the ground that the Home Minister had endangered the national security by agreeing to implement the surrender policy as suggested by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah.
But what actually happened on the D-day was nothing more than an anti-climax. Only a few disinterested BJP leaders and about half a dozen legislators and their personal followers assembled at the Bikram Chowk and enacted a drama of sorts. The laughing and non-serious BJP leaders and their handful of supporters ridiculed themselves and their party by not implementing the threat they had repeatedly issued and raising the otherwise very serious slogan while boarding the JKRTC buses to demonstrate that they were courting arrest for the national cause. The slogan was – Hum parvane kahan challe, jail chale bhai jail chale.
Not only had the little known party president Shamsher Singh Manhas but also the Leader of the BJP Legislature Party and former Minister of State in the Union Council of Ministers Cham Lal Gupta, who has practically played his inning but is unwilling to take political sanyas for reasons best known to him, met media persons a number of times during the past few days to share their views them on the new surrender policy mooted by the J&K Chief Minister and supported by the Union Government. Their objective was to garner public support so that they could create a difficult situation for the visiting Home Minister and tell the people of the state and the rest of the country that the BJP meant business and that it could go to any extent to implement its “nationalist” agenda.
It is significant to note that the BJP national leadership had, according to an insider, directed the J&K BJP leaders not to come to Indore and focus their attention and concentrate their energy on mass mobilization in order to make the anti-Home Minister programme a grand success. Indore was venue of the BJP’s National Council meeting. As directed, the local BJP leaders and legislators concentrated their energy on mobilizing public opinion and inducing them to join the anti-Chidambaram programme. But all their pleas and statements miserably failed to mobilize even the BJP workers, leave aside the general public.
There are reasons to believe that the BJP was not really interested in creating a difficult situation for the visiting Home Minister and the only intention of the BJP leaders was to grab the valuable space in the local newspapers and TV channels to remain in some limelight. That it was so became clear when the Home Minister passed through the Bikram Chowk at about 9.30 a.m. the number of BJP protestors there was not even a paltry one hundred. Most of the BJP leaders turn up at the Chowk at about eleven when everything was over.
The presence of the BJP leaders and their personal supporters was not even symbolic and that, too, in Jammu City, which houses the party headquarters and which is also the main area of its political operations and activities. The BJP leadership is itself responsible for the pace with which it has lost its support-base in Jammu. People now no longer consider the BJP as a party with a difference.
The people look down upon it as a party of differences, as also as a party that has lost its moorings and deviated from the ideology it used to propagate and adhere to till 1998, when its top-ranking national level leaders entered into an unholy alliance with several formations -- all opposed to what the BJP stood for till then – to fulfill their lust for political power. They also take the BJP party to mean an outfit consisting of rank opportunists and leaders fighting against one another in order to promote their respective vested interests.
No one can raise even his/her little finger against the critics of the BJP, who not-so-long-ago were the party’s ardent supporters. Everyone now knows that the BJP has given up its insistence on the abrogation of Article 370, implementation of the Uniform Civil Code across the country and construction of Ram Temple, notwithstanding some half-hearted statements the BJP leaders issue on occasions to show that their party has not given up its core ideology.
The people have now also come to know that it was the BJP that took the initiative in March 1999 at Colombo to dilute the Indian stand on J&K and Pakistan aimed at granting substantial concessions to the Kashmiri separatists, including maximum possible autonomy to Kashmir and its adjoining areas.
The rather poor attendance and lack of enthusiasm among those who gathered at the Bikram Chowk need to be viewed in this context. If the BJP wishes to play the role of a responsible opposition and catch the people’s imagination, it has to retrospect and move accordingly. The manner it is behaving and performing is not good for the country’s democratic health. Democracy becomes strong when the opposition party plays the role of an effective watchdog. The BJP is not that type of opposition party and it is time for the BJP leaders to sit up and examine the causes that have led their party to such a sorry state of affairs.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
