Bruised Mumbai seeks healing touch, BJP leaders shower political rhetoric

It was the most inopportune moment to settle political scores. But trust some BJP leaders to throw grace to the wind. Just when a bruised Mumbai needed soothing words from the political class and a healing touch, BJP spokesman Tarun Vijay unleashed a political diatribe of the nastiest kind.

“It is (UPA) a government of no governance, where the prime minister has become a laughing stock with zero authority and sub-zero credibility. Can India tolerate this humiliation at the hands of those who are trying to stay afloat in a sea of corruption, court cases and ministers in jail…The government’s instruments have been reduced to being tools of revenge for the political wing and the nation’s resistance power against the enemies is being diluted by the agents of vote bank politics,” he said in  a statement and went on to add that Wednesday’s bomb blasts exposed “anarchic state of affairs” under the UPA  government.

Nothing wrong in being critical of a political rival. But the timing and tone are what set a seasoned leader apart from the average one. Tarun Vijay certainly was not doing justice to his stature by letting loose.

Of course, he tried to make the right noise by calling people to abandon ideological differences and stand united as one nation in the moment of crisis. But that was too little to dilute the self-serving political intent in the guiding theme of his utterance.

BJP veteran LK Advani was doing no justice to enormous political experience by jumping into Pakistan-bashing straight away.

“I don’t know if it is Indian Mujahideen. But they get sustenance from Pakistan. The last attack on our land is proved to have been engineered by the ISI,” he said. He sought to put a political spin to the Mumbai blasts, adding, “It is a policy failure not intelligence failure…The government should have an attitude of zero tolerance towards terrorism.”

He said the government must take action to get ISI declared a terrorist organisation and stop all talks with Pakistan until it took concrete steps against terror.

As a vintage politician, Advani must be aware of the futility of closing the doors on Pakistan and the hollowness of expressions like ‘zero tolerance towards terrorism’. He would also be aware of the fact that the government of Atal Behari Vajpayee of which he was a senior member went out of the way to involve Islamabad in peace negotiations.

Obviously, in Mumbai he was catering to a political audience, not the hapless victims of the triple blasts. And the politics-mongering of the senior leader was not lost on all.

Another senior BJP leader, Arun Jaitley, sought to dig out the controversy over TADA to make a political point besides launching an attack on Pakistan. He said Pakistan had raised Lashkar-e-Taiba only to target India.

“India continues to be high on the terror list of terror outfits operating from Pakistan,” he said, adding, soon after India announced that Al Qaeda had presence on its territory, several terror groups such as Indian Mujahideen sprang up in the country.

The question here again is why launch into Pakistan-bashing so fast. Investigations are still in the preliminary stages. There’s no proof of Pakistan’s involvement in the blasts so far. It’s all right for the man on the street to jump to conclusions but coming from a senior member of a party which is waiting to take over the reins of power, it is a bit confounding.

Is it the foreign policy position of the party vis-a-vis Pakistan? One will never know. Things change when power equations change at the Centre. But was it the right occasion for the leaders to get into political positioning?

Are the victims of the blasts just electoral entities? Don’t they have any other identity than that of voters?