NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday charged the former Prime Minister, V.P. Singh, with "double standards on issues of probity" and with batting for the Congress. It was reacting to the comments Mr. Singh reportedly made in his memoirs released on Sunday.

``He took up the Rs. 60-crore Bofors scandal but why is he silent on the Scorpene deal, on Volcker and on Quattrocchi? Why was he so silent on the fodder scandal that hit Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad?"

BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad posed these questions when reporters asked him here about the political significance of Mr. Singh's birthday celebrations, which signalled a move to set up a new political front with an eye on the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls.

Mr. Prasad said: ``His shifting stand in politics has been well documented. He served as Minister in the Rajiv Gandhi Government, then took up the Bofors issue and went on to defeat the Congress; and he had an electoral understanding with the BJP and took its support when his Government was formed, yet he would not share a dais with the BJP during the election campaign."

Mr. Prasad said: ``Neither the BJP nor its leaders needed any certificate from him."

As for Mr. Singh's reported comment that the former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had at one point thought of leaving the BJP, Mr. Prasad quoted party leader Jaswant Singh: ``Such things are found in fiction, not in memoirs."

Separately, some BJP leaders said it was too early to say what shape the new `morcha' to be set up by Mr. Singh and others would take and what effect it would have on the U.P. political scene.

But the party's reaction to the `morcha' proposal suggests that it is far from comfortable with the possible fallout.

Would Mr. Singh take away some Thakur votes the BJP lays claim to by virtue of having a president who belongs to the community? Would he attract some backward caste votes because it was he who ushered in the Mandal era of politics in the north? Would he go in for an alliance with the Congress and push the BJP to the fourth place in U.P.? These questions are bothering the BJP.

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