The Hindu : Cong. has not learnt from its mistakes: Jaitley

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jan 07, 2003

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National

Cong. has not learnt from its mistakes: Jaitley

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI JAN. 6. The Bharatiya Janata Party today described the Congress Working Committee's analysis of the Gujarat elections as an "eyewash" and "an exercise in self-deception'' which showed that the party had refused to learn from its mistakes.

The party general secretary and spokesperson, Arun Jaitley, also took exception to what he described as an "hair-splitting exercise'' undertaken by the Congress in trying to differentiate between Hindutva (the BJP ideology) and Hinduism (the religion of the majority). In what appeared to be a contradictory stand, Mr. Jaitley maintained that the two words "do explain the same thing'' but Hindutva had "never been used in the context of religiosity but in the liberal context of culture".

His explanation was not clear when he was asked why the word Hindutva had to be coined by RSS ideologues when the liberal culture has been here for thousands of years.

Mr. Jaitley criticised the Congress for holding the Centre responsible for not being able to prevent the growing terrorist attacks — on Parliament, at Akshardham in Gujarat, at the Raghunath temple in Jammu and elsewhere. Would that mean the then Congress Governments were responsible for the terrorist attacks?

In response to questions, he said the Government of the day could be held responsible only if it did not respond adequately to a terrorist attack and if adequate security measures were not in place. "But when suicide squads attack, how can the Government be held responsible," he asked.

The Congress was making the same mistake it made in relation to Gujarat. "Its leaders maintained that the BJP was responsible for the Godhra carnage, it said terrorism was a non-issue, when the rest of the country held the ISI responsible,'' Mr. Jaitley said.

He also attacked the Congress for using the religious factor in its own campaign. The Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, "started her election campaign with a visit to a temple and `sadhus' accompanied Congress leaders during their campaign".

The Opposition party must not forget that the BJP won the Gujarat Assembly elections three times in a row, each time with an overwhelming majority. The results showed that it was a positive vote for the Modi Government, a positive vote for the Vajpayee Government at the Centre and a protest vote against the kind of "pseudo-secular politics practised by the Congress".

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