New Delhi, March 31
With the Supreme Court today dismissing the Centre’s plea to vacate its earlier order of maintaining status quo at the 67 acres of undisputed land
around the disputed site at Ayodhya, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in a bind as its plan to please the hardcore Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) lobby has virtually come to nought.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani were hopeful that the highest court of the land would offer a way out to the government and the BJP and act as a safety valve for the tremendous pressure that the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS) along with its allied organisations like the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the Dharam Sansad have been building up for the last couple of weeks.
But the Supreme Court has stuck to its earlier order, pushing the BJP top leadership into a tight corner, where its hopes of going into the next general elections on the Ram temple plank have been dashed.
While Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley said the government would fully comply with the Supreme Court’s judgement, sources said top leaders of the BJP would meet soon to evolve an
appropriate strategy on the situation.
As the VHP will mount pressure in the coming weeks, BJP leaders are seriously thinking of consulting the RSS leadership for finding a way out which will not hurt the party’s electoral prospects.
The VHP has kept up its pressure as it has blamed the BJP for the “unfavourable” Supreme Court verdict on Ayodhya and has warned that the future of the “secular BJP” is in danger unless it hands over the undisputed land through legislation.
“The next step is for Parliament to do something,” said VHP acting president Ashok Singhal in his first comments on the apex court order at the ‘satyagraha’ of the VHP and other
organisations for the ‘liberation of Ramjanambhoomi’.
The VHP’s future course of action would be decided by a meeting of ‘sants’ to be announced later, he told mediapersons after the apex court dismissed the government’s plea.
He said the BJP would have to take a “clear decision” as it had not done anything and the court also had not allowed it to do anything.
“Those who wanted to confuse us have themselves become confused,” he said, in an apparent reference to the Centre’s decision to approach the Supreme Court for vacating the stay against religious activities on the undisputed land at Ayodhya so that the construction of a Ram temple there could begin.
“If the government could decide on Shah Bano, they can now decide on Ayodhya,” he said.
Flaying the BJP’s “appeasement policy”, Mr Singhal cautioned that it would be a “very difficult period” for the BJP ahead. “We will isolate the Muslim appeasers. May be they will get the Muslim votes,” he added.
Mr Singhal said the BJP leadership would have to decide whether it wanted to remain a “secular” party. “Inside the BJP, there will now be an ideological division,” he said.
BJP leaders seriously
disagree with Mr Singhal’s proposal as it will isolate the BJP within the NDA camp and will vacate middle-of-the-road political ground for the Congress.
The BJP, which has been increasingly occupying the Congress’ earlier political positions in the last couple of years, will be back to square one.
