BJP on a High: On Govt's Reversal in Kashmir Shrine Row and on Ram Sethu

The Telegraph, 2 September 2008 BJP savours twin ‘errors’

SANJAY K. JHA

Jaitley New Delhi, Sept. 1: The BJP is delighted not just because the Amarnath shrine board has got the land it wanted but because it believes the resolution of the dispute has sent out a larger message. Namely, that Congress-led governments had bungled on the issue both at the Centre and in the state while the main Opposition party had correctly gauged the public mood. The BJP now plans to aggressively press the charge that the UPA has little regard for majority sentiments. As evidence, it will club the Amarnath row with the Sethusamudram ship canal controversy where the Centre had questioned the existence of Ram. BJP leaders have an explanation for these goofs: they claim ally pressure has put the Congress’s centrist politics under strain. Behind this theory lies a bigger political design. Historically, the Congress’s chief strength has been its capacity to feel the public pulse and take a centrist, middle path on issues, minimising bitterness among competing lobbies. This quality has often led to the party being described as the most authoritative spokesperson for national consensus. The rightist BJP is now looking to wrest that centrist political space which, Arun Jaitley freely admitted today, is “much larger” than the BJP’s core support base. Jaitley said: “By making these mistakes, it (the Congress) is vacating the centrist space and we become the natural claimants of that space.” Jaitley argued that had the Congress stuck to its traditional political style, and not yielded to ally pressure, it would not have bungled so badly on Amarnath and the Ram setu. While the ship canal fiasco allegedly came under DMK pressure, the People’s Democratic Party was behind the Amarnath flip-flop. The BJP also claims it read the public mood correctly in both the religion-tinged controversies while the Congress was forced to backtrack on both issues. The Congress-led Ghulam Nabi Azad government had first allotted Kashmir forestland to the shrine board before revoking the order under instructions from Delhi, which gave in to pressure from the Valley. Yesterday’s peace formula handed the land to the board, although with strict conditions absent in the original order. In the Sethusamudram row, the Centre has stepped back from a gung-ho position about destroying the Ram setu, a chain of lime shoals, to build a ship canal and is considering alternative alignments.