BJP expects Ram to deliver again

MUMBAI: If the Congress-NCP government in the state is out to woo minorities, the BJP is playing a game in which it is very good at — fanning religious sentiments to gain political mileage. The saffron party on Monday unveiled its version of majority-appeasement by announcing participation of around one lakh BJP workers in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s ‘protect Ram Setu’ agitation in Delhi on December 30.

State BJP president Nitin Gadkari said at a press conference here on Monday that the BJP whole-heartedly supported the VHP’s call to protest against the Sethusamudram project, and would be sending a lakh party workers to attend the rally to be held under the aegis of Ram Setu Bachao Sangharsh Samiti.

Senior state BJP leaders held a meeting to chalk out a strategy for the party’s participation in the VHP agitation, which the Sangh Parivar is trying to model on the Ram Janmabhumi movement of the nineties. Mr Gadkari said the party was not against a bridge establishing a sea-link between India and Sri Lanka but the destruction of Ram Setu or Adam’s Bridge, a chain of shoals between Sri Lanka and India, which is believed to have been built by Lord Ram. Mr Gadkari said the party will do whatever possible to thwart this plan. The BJP leader pointed out that even environmentalists and scientists have cautioned against this.

The VHP has called for a nationwide agitation to oppose the Sethusamudram project. BJP sources said the Parivar was looking at the meeting in Delhi as the starting point of a mass mobilisation campaign. “We would prove the sceptics wrong, who claim that religious faith and symbols of Hindu civilisation don’t anymore strike a populist chord. The Congress has once again got its political reading wrong by proposing this plan, and we will prove that a massive agitation can still be waged on this plank,” said a BJP strategist who attended the meeting.