#dnaEdit: BJP’s UP poll plank

The Uttar Pradesh assembly elections are a year away. But after the electoral boost in Assam, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has got into the act as it were by holding a rally in Sahranpur to mark the completion of two years in office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government early last week. It was a pre-election rally in disguise, where Modi spoke about the plight of the sugarcane farmers in the state and what his party would like to do to end their misery. Union home minister Rajnath Singh pleaded that the 14-year exile — a reference to Rama’s exile from Ayodhya as portrayed in the Ramayana — of the BJP should end, which is another way of saying to the people of the most populous state in the country to bring the party to power in Lucknow.

This has been followed by statements of two of UP’s BJP leaders, the party president of the state unit, Kailash Prasad Maurya, and Union Minister of State for Culture, Mahesh Sharma, that the party will fight the state assembly elections on the poll plank of development as articulated by Prime Minister Modi, and that the Ram temple at Ayodhya would not be made an election issue. This could mean either of two things. First, the BJP is genuinely convinced that the Ram temple controversy is almost a dead issue and that as it is unlikely to win votes, it makes sense to drop it altogether. 

The BJP realises that it would hurt the image of the Modi government among the non-committal voters, who would favour the BJP if it does not rake up communally sensitive issues like the Ram temple, and also its standing  in the international community. The other view, held mainly by the strident and inveterate critics of the BJP, is that the party is not serious about abandoning the Ram temple and that as a matter of fact it is its trump card, and that it is only protesting a little too much about not making Ram temple a poll issue. The critics insist that the BJP is really playing a game of cloak and dagger and it has no intention of giving up the Ram temple issue which helped the party to strike gold in the last 20 years.

The point can never be resolved as to what the BJP’s real position on the Ram temple is. Will the BJP use it as a political card if the party feels that the temple will give it an advantage? The official position of the party is that the Ram temple remains one of its core issues along with Article 370 (autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir) and uniform civil code, and that it believes the temple issue should be resolved amicably through mutual consent of the two communities or through  judicial process. The BJP then is not giving up the Ram temple issue. The construction of the temple in Ayodhya remains one of its political objectives. It is for the BJP to decide what its agenda should be.

And it is also the prerogative of the party to choose its tactics. It can, if it wants, keep the temple issue on the back-burner. 

It is indeed a matter of interest to political observers as to how the party is nimbly skirting around the issue — holding on to it without foregrounding it.