The Bharatiya Janata Party's opposition to minority welfare programmes, suggested at the National Development Council meeting, was part of its strategy of aggressive communal polarisation as general elections draw closer, the Communist Party of India-Marxist said on Thursday.

"As the next general elections draw closer, such aggressive communal polarisation will be on the rise. The facade of coalition dharma, frequently articulated under the

Vajpayee government, will increasingly take a back seat," Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of CPI-M's mouthpiece People's Democracy.

He was reacting to BJP chief Rajnath Singh's directive to Chief Ministers to oppose all minority welfare measures suggested by the United Progressive Alliance government at the NDC meeting.

"The saffron party's opposition must be seen as a part of the larger strategy being employed currently by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh/BJP and its affiliates,  that is return to the basics," Yechury said, indicating that the BJP is sticking to core Hindutva issues like construction of a temple in Ayodhya, abolition of Article 370 and uniform civil code.

The anointment of L K Advani as the Prime Ministerial candidate "presuming that they are ever able to win a general election," was central to this strategy, he said, adding that their effort would be to "recall the memory of the infamous rathyatra preceding the Babri Masjid demolition."

Maintaining that such an aggressive stand by the BJP would "throw its allies in the National Democratic Alliance into a state of high discomfort," Yechury said this would not augur well for the "future of India's secular democratic republican foundations."