The Hindu : 'Bid to bring communal agenda to the fore'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 09, 2004

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'Bid to bring communal agenda to the fore'

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MARCH 8. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) today expressed apprehension that the impending `India Shining' yatra by the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, was an attempt to bring to the fore the communal agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

``The facts that are now unfolding confirm our apprehension that the yatra signals an attempt to bring to the fore the communal agenda,'' the CPI(M) Politburo member, Sitaram Yechury, and the party leader in the Rajya Sabha, Nilotpal Basu, said at a press conference here.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad are trying to make the BJP to include all the four controversial issues — Ayodhya, Article 370, common civil code and ban on cow slaughter — in its `Vision Document' that was a euphemism for manifesto to keep the otherwise ``servile allies of the NDA in good humour'' and also to ensure that Mr. Advani can take up these issues during his yatra.

Mr. Yechury and Mr. Basu said that while the communal violence on the 1990 route taken by Mr. Advani were recorded the latest journey route would take him through some of the most densely minority-populated areas. ``These issues and their articulation by Mr. Advani is aimed at instilling a sense of fear among the minorities and whip up a passion where feel good has failed to evoke a response.''

Welcoming the general atmosphere of improved India-Pakistan relations, the party objected to the equating of the Hindu-Muslim question with this relationship and subtly questioning the territorial loyalty of the Indian Muslims. This, the party said, was aimed at ``reinforcing communally inspired stereotypes.''

They said that notwithstanding the ``India Shining'' campaign for which crores were spent, the BJP had realised that it was backfiring both in the rural and urban areas and Mr. Advani himself had admitted this in a meeting in Haryana.

The yatra, they said, was explained by Mr. Advani that as an ``intrinsic link'' between this and the previous two journeys he had undertaken in 1990 and 1997. ``He has left it to nobody's imagination to understand the motivation'' and added that there was a ``conceptual and emotional thread of resurgent nationalism that ran through all of them.''

Accusing this statement as a ``classic case of BJP double-speak,'' the CPI(M) said when the ``feel good constituency'' was evidently failing to evoke the desired electoral returns, the yatra has become inevitable for the BJP in the face of counter-campaign by the secular forces exposing the claims made through `India Shining' campaign.

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