BJP president Rajnath Singh on Wednesday played two different knocks at the same time on a single issue.
On the one hand he regretted fissures cropping up in the relations with old ally JD-U whom he does not want to leave the coalition. On the other, the saffron party chief shielded his chief minister of Gujarat from the attacks of the Bihar regional party by giving Narendra Modi a clean chit in the 2002 riots case.
The BJP president said that he cannot imagine a chief minister would “provoke riots” and that communal person can survive in the BJP, clearly indicating that the right to choose a prime ministerial candidate cannot be forced on the biggest partner of the NDA coalition. His statement assumes importance as even Shiv Sena called for a NDA meeting to let allies know who will be their electoral face.
During his interaction with journalists at the Indian Women’s Press Corps Singh stated: “I have been a chief minister myself, so on the basis of my experience I can say no chief minister wants any anarchy or law and order problem in his state. I cannot believe he (Modi) would have provoked any law and order problem. I cannot even imagine a chief minister would provoke riots”.
Asserting that the BJP was the “most secular party”, Singh launched a counter attack on the Congress by recalling former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s widely reported comment on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots post his mother Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Without naming Rajiv Gandhi, the BJP chief said, “after the Hindu-Sikh riots, a senior leader who is no more and I will not name him, said when big trees fall, the earth shakes”.
When journalists tried to remind him of another equally loaded statement by Modi himself after the riots, which was that every action has a reaction, Singh said that the remark was not verified. “It was not verified that Narendra Modi said that. The comment has been refuted by him,” he pointed out.
JD-U chief Nitish Kumar too had taken objection to the BJP’s attempts to project Modi, so far unofficially, as the prime ministerial candidate on the grounds that 2002 riots took place during his regime.
Kumar’s jibe had led to a war of words, and BJP had retaliated, asking why he, as the then railways minister, had chosen to remain silent in 2002 when the incident took place during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s reign.
Singh, however, does want a slinging match between the two partners to be played out in public as it would blunt their attack on misgovernance and corruption in the Central government.
On Tuesday, he had cautioned party spokespersons in a meeting from escalating the verbal war which was visible in the briefing a day later as Shanawaz Hussain avoided lending weight to reporters’ questions on the difference between the two parties.
Singh too told the journalists that “this crisis is unfortunate. We would never want any ally to leave. Allies have different ideologies, there can be issue-based differences.”