NEWS
VIEWS
INTERVIEWS
CAMPAIGN TRAIL
ISSUES '98
MANIFESTOS
OVERHEARD
POLLING BOOTH
INDIA SPEAKS!
YEH HAI INDIA
CHAT

Coalition govt even if BJP wins majority: Advani

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

If the Bharatiya Janata Party-led multi-party alliance gets a majority in the 1998 general election, it will be a coalition government involving all partners of the alliance, with a common minimum programme.

This was the main thrust of party president Lal Kishinchand Advani's press briefing in the Tamil Nadu capital on Sunday.

"And with our allies, we will win a comfortable, not just a simple majority, of over 300 seats in the Lok Sabha poll," Advani said.

The BJP boss was in TN to launch his alliance's campaign here, which will be led, on the ground, by the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The first rally of the campaign was addressed by the BJP's prime ministerial candidate Atal Bihari Vajpayee, AIADMK supremo Jayalalitha Jayaram, Advani and leaders of the other alliance partners on Sunday evening.

The BJP president, however, made it clear that while there would be a CMP after the alliance came to power, the individual allies were still free to stress on their specific issues in their election manifestoes. Thus, he explained, if the AIADMK felt that issues such as Ayodhya, Kashmir and Mathura should be put in cold storage for the next 20 years -- as party boss Jayalalitha said on Friday -- then the BJP would honour it as the view of its ally. The BJP's own stand on these and other issues, he added, would be clarified when the party manifesto is released in Delhi on Tuesday.

"Such differences will not matter in a coalition government, being formed with a minimum programme," Advani said in response to a question. "Stability of government is the central issue facing the country today, and we have joined hands with that in mind."

Interestingly, while Jayalalitha at her press briefing last week referred to Sonia Gandhi as a 'foreigner' and vowed that the AIADMK would fight her entry into politics tooth and nail, Advani for his part indicated that the Congress leader's 'foreign' status would not be an election issue. "However," he added, "people have been referring to provisions in the American and some other constitutions, which permit only a natural-born citizen of the land to contest for the top office, be it that of the President or the prime minister," he added.

Advani felt it was only the BJP-led alliance that had a chance of providing stability at the Centre. "We are united, while our adversaries are divided between the Congress and what was once the United Front -- thus, they can only lead the country to another round of instability," he argued.

On the same subject, Advani expressed his 'regret' that the Congress was actually disintegrating faster than even he had expected. "I had hoped that Sonia Gandhi's entry into the Congress would check desertions and disintegration, but K C Pant and Sunil Shastri, both representing traditional Congress families, have left the party after her entry, proving me wrong."

"At the rate the Congress is declining,' he added, "I would not be surprised if, a few years from now, we find ourselves reverting to a uni-polar polity where the BJP is the only force to reckon with. That will be sad, both for the Congress and for the nation."

Asked about the United Front, Advani said its constituents had been fighting each other with such vehemence that the word 'united' was increasingly a misnomer. "They had a United Front government, but today you do not know to which 'Dal' even its Prime Minister I K Gujral belongs," Advani quipped, pointing out that Gujral is the Janata Dal's prime ministerial nominee, but he has sympathy for the rival Rashtriya Janata Dal led by Laloo Prasad Yadav, and further, needed the Akali Dal's support to even contest the Lok Sabha poll.

The situation, Advani argued, was playing straight into the hands of "foreign forces who did not like the idea of a stable and strong India taking its place at the forefront of the comity of nations. By hoping for a hung Parliament, indeed by working towards it, the Congress and the UF are actually contributing to the destabilising of the nation."

Asked to name these "foreign forces" -- reminiscent, strangely, of the infamous 'foreign hand' touted by the late Indira Gandhi -- Advani had no direct answer. Neither would be give a categorical response when asked if he believed these "forces" were funding the 'forces of destabilisation' in this election.

"We have heard such charges during earlier elections, and even the then Union home minister, Y B Chavan, had once made a similar statement in Parliament," was all he would say. Making it rather obvious that he was, in fact, adopting for his party a platform used rather stridently, in her time, by Indira Gandhi.

Reverting to the safer subject of what his party and its allies hoped to do if and when returned to power, Advani said that consensus would be the key. "Be it the WTO, or other economic issues, we will work towards a 'national consensus', where not only political parties but even industry will be involved," Advani said. "Patriotism should be the 'dynamo' for progress, and this will be the basis for our development plans, if we find ourselves in government."

"Our coalition is strong, we will win the election and form the government with the existing partners," Advani reiterated, when a newsman wanted to know whether the BJP was 'soft-peddling' its criticism of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, only with the post-poll strategy in mind.

While on the subject of possible issues, Advani indicated, albeit indirectly, that the Jain Commission report, which sparked the fall of the Gujral government, would not figure high on his party's agenda. "We would prefer to wait for the final report before making our comments," the BJP leader said.

Asked about the special court verdict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, which reportedly refers inter alia to V Gopalswamy, leader of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a partner in the BJP-AIADMK alliance, Advani said, "I haven't read the full judgment, and I was happy when I read in the newspapers that Gopalaswamy has distanced himself from the Tigers."

Would corruption be an issue? "Yes," said Advani, adding that the eradication of corruption and criminality in politics would form a major item in the common minimum programme for his alliance if it forms the next government.

Asked if there wasn't a bit of a dichotomy there, considering that AIADMK leader Jayalalitha and several of her former cabinet colleagues are facing corruption charges, Advani said, rather cryptically, "But those questions only arise after the poll."

Tell us what you think of this report