Get ready for polls: Advani to MPs

WITH early polls looking imminent, BJP was getting set to talk up the NDA’s ‘stable government’ plank in the days to come. The party compared the performance of the NDA with that of the UPA on Thursday and described the latter as an opportunistic alliance aimed at keeping the BJP out of power. Opposition leader L K Advani told a meeting of BJP’s parliamentary group that the NDA ‘worked effectively’ under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Briefing reporters on the meeting, spokesman V K Malhotra said the coalition in power now was ‘opportunistic and had been put together just to keep the BJP out’. He also said that Mr Advani had told BJP MPs that he believed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government would not last its full term. The spokesperson said all BJP MPs had been told to visit their constituencies after the monsoon session of Parliament to prepare for early elections. He said Mr Advani had told the MPs at the meeting that the government would fall whether or not the Left withdrew support to it over the Indo-US civilian nuclear co-operation agreement. “Elections can happen anytime,” Mr Malhotra quoted Mr Advani as saying.

In the wake of the crisis faced by the government due to the Left’s opposition to the nuclear deal, Mr Advani had, some days ago, said that mid-term polls were a certainty. He had also said it was unclear how long the crisis would drag, but stressed that the government would not survive. Though the BJP, like most other parties, does not want to go the polls immediately, it is preparing to make the current differences between Congress and Left parties an election issue. With polls likely to be held within 6-9 months, even if the government weathers the present crisis, the Opposition BJP is getting ready for it by changing its rhetoric to hit out at the alliance to begin with.

Mr Malhotra also accused the Congress of attempts to trigger Hindu-Muslim riots ahead of the Gujarat assembly elections by saying party president Sonia Gandhi’s bid to get the Maharashtra government to act on the Srikrishna Commission report on the 1993 communal violence in Mumbai was prompted by vote-bank politics. “There is no need to reopen this report now when the Congress government, which is in power since 1999 in Maharashtra, itself did not act on it,” he said.