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BJP back to form

After a dispirited stint in the wilderness, the Bharatiya Janata Party is back in form, doing what it knows best to do — disrupt Parliament, invade the streets, and try to impose a divisive agenda by force. As in the past, the party has assumed the garb of super-patriotism against opponents portrayed as enemies of the state. It is in hyper-aggressive mode on two issues. The first is the alleged delay in hanging Mohammad Afzal, sentenced to death by the Supreme Court for his role in the December 13, 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament. The Hindu has consistently advocated the abolition of the death penalty, contending in a recent editorial that "however gruesome the crime, the taking of a human life by the state under the banner of justice dehumanises society as a whole." There is something politically and morally obscene about political parties behaving like lynch mobs out to shorten a human life. The saffron brigade's campaign has ranged from plastering the capital with posters demanding Afzal's execution through macabre signature campaigns to hate speeches calculated to inflame communal passions. In a crude attempt to pressure a head of state who, as recently as October 2005, suggested a review of the death penalty, the BJP has taken its `hang Afzal' campaign even into Rashtrapati Bhavan. More than 20 mercy petitions are pending before President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, many of them received during the rule of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. When in power, the BJP did not seek the execution of the petitioners — among them four members of an LTTE squad sentenced to death for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. It registered no outrage when, in November 1999, the leader of the Pattali Makkal Katchi, an NDA constituent, pleaded for clemency for Rajiv's killers.

The second issue the BJP has taken up aggressively is Government's reluctance to adopt a Parliamentary resolution declaring that Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India. It may have been impolitic of Ambassador Sun Yuxi to restate a claim to the whole of the State ahead of President Hu Jintao's visit. Yet this has been China's stated position, clearly a bargaining point, for more than four decades. India's position that the State is an integral part of India has been clearly reiterated by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee — inside and outside Parliament. The BJP needs to be reminded that it was its own government that took the initiative for a peaceful resolution of the India-China boundary issue. It was during Prime Minister Vajpayee's 2003 visit to Beijing that the two countries agreed each to "appoint a Special Representative to explore from the political perspective of the overall bilateral relationship the framework of a boundary settlement."

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