High on adrenalin after the Gujarat poll sweep, BJP chief Venkaiah Naidu today left no one in any doubt that the Hindutva card was here to stay and that the party won’t be shy of playing it.
As BJP leaders met at the first national executive meeting after the Gujarat polls at the Parliament House Annexe here today, Naidu swore by Hindutva, describing the Gujarat verdict as ‘‘a mandate for the ideology’’.
‘‘The Gujarat message,’’ he declared, ‘‘is loud and clear. The message is that in the name of politically-motivated secularism, the countrymen are not willing any more to tolerate... Hindu-bashing...’’ He went on to proclaim dreamily that ‘‘one day our nation would travel on the path of the ideology that has all along been guiding us and that moment of reckoning is not very far.’’
Certainly not, if the BJP has its way, for it would strive hard to fight the coming elections in nine states and the next Lok Sabha polls on the same plank.
In order to debunk a strong suspicion that the BJP may abandon a liberal Atal Behari Vajpayee as this ‘‘moment or reckoning’’ approaches, Naidu went out of his way to cosy up to him.
The effort did make Naidu sound a little bombastic, describing the Prime Minister as a ‘‘mahapurush...the founder of our party and the fountain of inspiration for all of us’’ and endowed with ‘‘priceless assets for our party and our nation’’ like ‘‘wisdom, sagacity, experience and his personal quality of carrying people of all shades along...’’
Making up for whatever Naidu left unsaid was a massive garland which donned Vajpayee’s neck at the outset. There was a consolation prize for his deputy, L K Advani, too — he was given the same honour minus the praise which was showered on Vajpayee.
The party’s Gujarat hero, Narendra Modi, was missing at the inaugural session, busy in a Cabinet meeting at Ahmedabad. He showed up to a loud applause in the afternoon. His absence, however, did not deter Naidu from proclaiming that Modi ‘‘fought like a lion in the face of unprecedented calumny against him and our party and made, on counting day, his opponents run for cover.’’
He described the polls as a Modi-versus-Sonia Gandhi contest and said ‘‘the results have shown what an uneuqal bout it was.’’ The results, according to him, had ‘‘demolished the myth that the Congress is getting revived on account of its leadership.’’
While hammering Hindutva home, Naidu shrewdly skipped the contentious issues of Ayodhya, a common civil code and Article 370 but demanded ‘‘an effective nation-wide law against conversion by fraudulent means’’ and abolition of the ineffective law to check infiltration from Bangladesh.
At the same time, he made a veiled appeal to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to tone down its rhetoric.
He said: ‘‘I would also like to make an appeal to those who speak in the name of Hindutva but whose pronouncements sometimes sound as if they are only reaching to the extremism and intolerance that has taken roots across the border.
Hindutva is a noble and elevating
concept...Hindutva and extremism cannot go together...’’ Naidu vowed to
‘‘replicate’’ the Gujarat ‘‘collective work’’ everywhere and said that
the party would target the Congress on its non-performance, misrule, inefficiency,
corruption, worsening law and order situation and non- fulfilment of promises
in the states ruled by it.