New Delhi, March 29: In a rhetoric suggesting “we told you so,” the Congress on Monday lashed out at the BJP for its “chaal, charitra and chehra,” in the wake of the WikiLeaks expose where Leader of the Opposition in RS Arun Jaitley is supposed to have told the US official that Hindu nationalism is an opportunistic issue.
The Congress claimed, “it only showed how the BJP is double-tongued, double-faced and completely unscrupulous in its convictions.” Quoting chapter and verse from the BJP documents, Congress Spokesperson Manish Tewari tried to project how the utterances of the BJP leaders were at variance from the party documents.
The BJP’s own website, Manish Tewari said, states “Hindutva or cultural nationalism presents the BJP’s conception of Indian nationhood.” But Jaitley characterised it as “opportunistic.” Quoting from the BJP election manifesto for the general election in 2009, Tewari said the party position on the FDI in retail was very clear.
It stated, “the BJP understands the critical importance of retail trade in the context of employment and services provided by them, and thus favours a dominant role for the unincorporated sector in retail trade. Towards this end, it will not allow foreign investment in the retail sector. After agriculture, the retail sector is the largest employer of nearly four crore people.”
But the US cable quotes Jaitley as saying, “foreign competition should not seriously hurt the mom and pop stores that form a BJP constituency.” Similarly, Tewari pointed out the shift in the position of Arun Jaitley on opening legal services to foreign competition.
As the then Union Law Minister in the Vajpayee Govt, in response to a starred question in Parliament, Arun Jaitley said there was no proposal for opening the legal services to foreign competition, but when in Opposition in 2005, he reversed his own position. PM Manmohan Singh had recently linked the BJP opposition to the Goods and Service Tax to the action against the then Gujarat Minister Amit Shah. Now, Jaitley had himself admitted that the BJP’s opposition to Value Added Tax at the state level was based on a narrow political calculus.
The BJP Foreign Policy Resolution at the BJP national executive on December 26-27, 2005, in Mumbai, stated, “what must be at the core of our understanding is that ‘strategic partnership’ is ordinarily between two equals. Any ‘lock-in’ with the US strategic relations or accepting an asymmetrical relationship is not ‘strategic partnership,’ it would be capitulation.”
This, BJP national executive member Seshadri Chari said it was meant for scoring political brownie points. Tewari wondered whether it only means that the BJP leaders are pleading that their policy positions should not be taken seriously.
—Agencies