Change in BJP stand?

By Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI, JULY 13. It is with mixed feelings that the Bharatiya Janata Party is looking at the India-Pakistan summit. The hardliners in the party - fed over years on a ``hate-Pakistan propaganda'' - are unhappy that there has been no matching response from Pakistan to the ``unilateral'' gestures announced by the Vajpayee Government, and the moderates are also quite unsure of what the summit will achieve, given the rising pitch of the rhetoric from the other side.

That the BJP has reconciled itself to a moderation of its earlier hard stance on Kashmir was more than obvious when the senior party leader, Mr. Pyarelal Khandelwal, today conceded that ``there is a dispute'' in Kashmir, a point that the party and even India's foreign policy makers have been reluctant to admit. But Mr. Khandelwal maintained that the party ``will not accept the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as the international border.'' He pointed out that the issue had also been clarified by the External Affairs Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh.

However, Mr. Khandelwal was not willing to accept that in recognising Kashmir as a dispute the party had made a big departure from its earlier stand.

It was not clear whether the new stance was reflective of a new position of the Government - that directly or indirectly it was now ready to accept Kashmir as a ``dispute.''

``That the Pakistan President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is coming to India for talks itself is a mark of success, for after Kargil there was so much bitterness and distance between the two countries,'' Mr. Khandelwal said. But it was also admitted privately by some leaders that the Shiv Sena's hard stance (how can we greet and salute the man who was the architect of Kargil and responsible for the deaths of our jawans) had touched the hearts of hardcore BJP sympathisers.

Party leaders believe that the Vajpayee Government has met with remarkable success on ``turning international opinion around on Pakistan and its abetment of terrorism.'' Mr. Khandelwal pointed out that for the first time the United Nations Secretary-General had rejected the old Kashmir-related U.N. resolutions.

The BJP view is: for the moment it may seem that the Vajpayee Government has given too many unilateral concessions, but in the long run they will have a positive effect on international opinion.

Slowly but surely, India has been able to convince the world that it wants peace, and that it is Pakistan which is preventing a resolution of the 53-year old problem.

But these are the views of a clutch of senior leaders. The problem for the party is how to live down its past rhetoric and explain to its cadre that the Vajpayee Government's willingness to do business with the man who rubbished the Lahore Declaration by his Kargil move was right.

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