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National

Make Advani Prime Minister, BJP tells voters

Neena Vyas

— Photo. Bhagya Prakash K.

BJP leader L.K. Advani addressing the public meeting organised by BJP in Bangalore on Saturday.

BANGALORE: In its political resolution adopted here on Saturday, the Bharatiya Janata Party sought to occupy the nationalist political space and directly appealed to voters to make senior leader L.K. Advani the country’s prime minister.

The four-page resolution adopted on the second day of the party’s national executive committee meeting here devoted considerable space to the nuclear deal, the Jammu and Kashmir issue and the lack of a convincing fight against terrorism — citing these issues as examples where the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had ignored national interests.

At the very outset, the resolution stated that national interests were threatened because of the manner in which the UPA government had dealt with important issues. In his intervention during the discussion on the resolution, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi said the Congress led by its president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had allowed its own party position on national sovereignty to drift.

While Mr. Modi focused on the handling of terrorism, the ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India and the refusal of the Centre to allow Gujarat to adopt a terror-specific law, BJP leader Arun Shourie focused once again on the India-U.S. nuclear deal. Mr. Shourie reiterated the BJP position: the deal had committed India to no further tests; there was no assured nuclear fuel supply; and India had accepted binding and intrusive inspections of its nuclear installations. In short it had surrendered its sovereignty.

On Jammu and Kashmir, its leaders Chamanlal and Soufi Yusuf said that the people of the Valley were not in fact with the separatists before whom the UPA had surrendered.

While briefing reporters on the resolution, general secretary Ananth Kumar said the Congress had itself diluted its earlier stand on various issues relevant to nationalism which the BJP described as a politics of appeasement.

The resolution referred to a “suffering and insecure India” as a result of high inflation and terrorism.

Although the BJP has taken a strident position on J&K by asking for abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution, in response to a question Mr. Kumar said a future National Democratic Alliance government would be guided by an agenda of governance acceptable to all its allies.

Mr. Kumar told reporters that the BJP’s core campaign issues would be inflation, terrorism and UPA’s vote bank politics. The nuclear deal would figure as part of terrorism and insecure India theme as by stopping further nuclear tests India’s security had been compromised.

The final sentence in the resolution made a direct appeal to voters to free the country from the “curse of the UPA” and ensure formation of an NDA government with L.K. Advani as the prime minister.

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