The Hindu : U.P. alliance to continue: BJP

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 02, 2003

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U.P. alliance to continue: BJP

By Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI APRIL 1. The Bharatiya Janata Party leadership today gave a clear message to its legislators from Uttar Pradesh: the party's alliance with the Mayawati Government is here to stay and rather than blaming the coalition the party should do some self-introspection on why its support base in the State had dwindled over the last few years.

More than a hundred BJP MLAs, MLCs, State unit office-bearers and Ministers took part in a four-hour discussion with the party's central leadership on the "deteriorating" political situation in the State. For about an hour, the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, joined the deliberations at the residence of the party president, Venkaiah Naidu, where three general secretaries, Rajnath Singh, Pramod Mahajan and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, were present.

Later in the evening, the legislators and leaders had tea with the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, at his residence. They were told that coalitions were inevitable when mandates were fractured. The message to those disenchanted with the Mayawati Government was unambiguous: learn to function within the "dharma" of coalition politics.

While there is no doubt that many legislators have been expressing the view that continuation in the coalition Government was costing the party dearly, Mr. Advani himself made it clear that the party's graph had dipped considerably well before the coalition took shape. After all, the Assembly election results had placed the BJP in the number three slot and the BSP in the number two position.

About 50 MLAs participated in the discussions. They spoke on the problems in the State — broken election promises, non-performance and inaccessibility of Ministers, the Raja Bhaiyya POTA case, the fact that legislators were living under the threat of cases being foisted on them, etc. Their suggestions will be processed and decisions taken on how to proceed to make the coalition Government more effective and improve the BJP's own support base.

The party leadership decided that it would meet the BJP Ministers in the State separately to ensure that they pay heed to legislators.

Apparently, Mr. Advani reminded the legislators of the State's political importance. The party must take lessons from the plight of the Congress which had not been able to recover after it lost its base in the State. The moral was that a coalition with Mayawati was essential to get the maximum winning seats for the alliance on this side of the political fence.

The Ayodhya issue did not figure, Mr. Mahajan later told reporters. He said that only one legislator said that if the party wanted 300 seats in the Lok Sabha a Ram temple at the `janmasthan' in Ayodhya was a must. But it seems that as far as the NDA Government is concerned a fresh attempt on Ayodhya is out of the question. Privately, one party leader noted that Ayodhya was not on the NDA agenda and there was no way the Cabinet of an NDA Government would approve a legislation to hand over the disputed Ayodhya land to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

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