NEW DELHI, 24 July 2006 — Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh has accused the Narendra Modi government of mishandling the Gujarat riots leading to loss of state control. In a candid admission of failure of the state administration, the former external affairs minister counts the 2002 riots in the state as one of the two “major negatives” in the history of the BJP.
According to Jaswant, the failure of control over the Ayodhya temple campaign is the other blemish on the party since it formally came into existence in 1980. “On the BJP’s scorecard, there are two major negatives.
First, the getting out of hand of the Ayodhya Ram temple issue, the consequent vandalism at the site, the pulling down of it in December 1992,” says the BJP veteran in his just-released book “A Call to Honor: In Service of Emergent India”.
“The other is the loss of state control, in 2002, in Gujarat, after a trainload of pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were trapped and their bogie set on fire in Godhra,” he writes.
