NEW DELHI, 22 October — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee yesterday warned that a widening “communication gap” between his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the coalition government he heads could affect political stability. Vajpayee said that the constituents of his 24-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had their own identities and ideologies, but had to submerge these in the interest of a stable central government.
“There is no contradiction between building a strong BJP and in pushing through the agenda of the NDA government,” Vajpayee said in his address at a ceremony held to mark the 50th anniversary of Jan Sangh, the party of which BJP is an offshoot. The prime minister said that his party, after decades spent in the opposition, appeared to lack experience in running a government.
“The difficulty is that we don’t have much experience of power. Something, somewhere is amiss,” he told more than 1,200 party delegates from all over the country who had gathered for the ceremony at a sports stadium in the capital.
BJP leaders said they were not unduly worried about the differences that cropped up periodically between the members of the top echelons of the ruling party. Vajpayee is seen as the moderate face of the party, while Home Minister L.K. Advani is the hard-liner pushing a more extreme pro-Hindu agenda. Vajpayee’s coalition is in no imminent danger despite grumbling among its constituents over the government’s privatization policy and its attempts to push through a Hindu revivalist agenda in the school curriculum. There have been murmurs of disapproval from Vajpayee’s coalition partners after former Defense Minister George Fernandes was reappointed to the job earlier this week. Fernandes had resigned as the defense minister in March after a website leveled bribery charges against some defense officials and members of Fernandes’ party. The scandal triggered a crisis for Vajpayee, who appointed a retired Supreme Court judge to investigate the charges. The probe is yet to be completed.
