The Hindu : Sonia assails 'divisive approach'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Feb 25, 2003

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Sonia assails 'divisive approach'

By Anita Joshua

NEW DELHI FEB. 24. Critical of the Government for trying to portray the country as a nation at peace with itself in the President's address to Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sonia Gandhi, today said the much-touted vision of the future could neither rest on a reinvention of the past nor be founded on a rejection of "India's syncretic heritage and composite legacy".

In her intervention on the motion of thanks to the President's address, Ms. Gandhi articulated the Opposition contention that it camouflaged the failures of the BJP-led coalition and its "deeply divisive approach to governance".

Referring to the one-line commitment to secularism in the President's address, she questioned the nature of the assurance "when we have seen the BJP-ruled State Governments engage in the most pernicious form of communal propaganda and practice", and certain elements within the BJP and some NDA allies being allowed to engage in the most "dangerous kind of rabble-rousing and get away with the most outrageous and incendiary of public pronouncements".

On Ayodhya — "a place where war is absent" — she said organisations such as the VHP were destroying the very meaning of the sacred place with their "belligerent posturing and sabre-rattling". Of the view that all concerned ought to wait for the court verdict, she called for codification of steps to prevent communal tensions/riots and rehabilitation measures.

Taking a dig at the BJP leader, V.K. Malhotra — who, while moving the motion of thanks, took pride in his party ushering India into the nuclear club — Ms. Gandhi said this was of no solace "when the hands that wield that power are busy trying to destroy our internal harmony and cohesion". Though in agreement with the Government for being vigilant vis-a-vis Pakistan, she argued that jingoism and war hysteria were not a substitute for sound policy.

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