The BJP-ruled Rajasthan govt had recently sent two senior ministers to West Bengal to “study the art” of managing elections.
NEW DELHI: Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s praise of the Marxists’ ability to win elections has embarrassed the BJP. But party spokesmen conceded that the BJP was willing to “learn one or two good things even from its rivals” including the Left. The BJP-ruled Rajasthan government had recently sent two senior ministers to West Bengal to “study the art” of managing elections from the Left Front. On their part, the Left leaders were elated by the praise.
Party spokesman Prakash Javadekar was dismissive of the way Vajpayee’s comment was interpreted by the media and claimed that the Left’s success in West Bengal was due to good politics, not good governance.
Vajpayee in his speech to the National Executive on May 29, which was published by the party’s in-house publication BJP Today, said the Communist parties were moving ahead fast and the BJP should learn from them the art of getting a renewed mandate. “We may have repeated 100 times that the NDA government performed well, yet something was lacking. People praised our work, but did not renew their mandate,” he said.
Javadekar said the Left’s success was limited to West Bengal where it has managed to retain power uninterrupted since 1977. It was also a fact that the same combination could not repeat its performance elsewhere, like in Kerala, where it has been losing to the Congress-led alliance every alternate term.
The Left Front seemed elated over Vajpayee’s remarks. In a positive response to Vajpayee’s observations on the Communist parties, the leaders of the CPI, CPI (M) and Forward Bloc said the Communist parties getting re-elected for nearly three decades in West Bengal was “neither art nor science, but the result of consistent and relentless struggle for land reforms, development of infrastructure in the rural areas and ending acute scarcity of power.”
They took the opportunity to ask the UPA, particularly the Congress, to draw lessons from what happened to the NDA in 2004, as people judge any government on the basis of its performance and fulfillment of commitments and promises.
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