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Rajnath: we’ll never depart from Hindutva

Mumbai: BJP president Rajnath Singh launched the campaign for the Maharashtra Assembly elections, addressing party workers here late on Friday evening. The occasion was the birth anniversary (July 6) of Dr. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, who founded the Jana Sangh in 1951.

Mr. Singh criticised reports that the Lok Sabha election results sounded the death knell for the BJP. “In 1998, the Congress had been reduced to 114 seats, but no one spoke this way about it,” he said. “Today, we have 116 seats, but we are the only ones to have built a political stature taller than that of the Congress.”

He was emphatic that the BJP would never digress from the Hindutva path. “Everyone is saying that the BJP will have to become moderate, but the party will never change its character,” he said amid applause and loud cries of ‘Bharat mata ki jai’

General secretary Gopinath Munde criticised the Centre for not giving Mumbai its due in either the Railway or Union budget. He slammed the State government for not making public the findings of the Pradhan Committee on the administrative lapses in during the terror attacks last November. He said the Bandra-Worli Sea Link would be renamed after freedom fighter Vinayak Savarkar when the BJP came to power.

The party’s Maharashtra president Nitin Gadkari too raised the issue of naming the city’s newest landmark. Marta kya nahi karta [One who is about to die does all sorts of things to leave a mark], he said. “Work on the next phase from Worli to Nariman Point hasn’t yet begun, and the government has already named it after Rajiv Gandhi. It knows it is not going to come back to power.”

New Delhi Special Correspondent reports:

Mr. Rajnath Singh on Saturday made Mr. Munde in charge of the Maharashtra Assembly polls.

BJP president Mr. Rajnath Singh was referring to the 1999 elections when he said that the Congress won 114 seats. The second paragraph of a report "Rajnath: we'll never depart from Hindutva" (July 12, 2009) said "'In 1998, the Congress had been reduced to 114 seats ..'" In 1998, the Congress won 141 seats.

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