NEW DELHI, Jan 25: The Bharatiya Janata Party's campaign in Delhi is to be launched with a bang on February 2, with top party leaders, leaders of allied parties and six chief ministers attending a public meeting on that day. The aim is to put up a massive show of strength that would send a signal to the rest of the country.Besides Atal Behari Vajpayee and L K Advani, Jayalalitha (AIADMK), George Fernandes (Samata Party), and Chief Ministers Manohar Joshi, Parkash Singh Badal, Bansi Lal, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Sahib Singh Verma and Kalyan Singh will be present. Ramakrishna Hegde (Lok Shakti) and Naveen Patnaik (Biju Janata Dal) have also been invited, party general secretary M Venkaiah Naidu announced.
In a frontal attack on Sonia Gandhi, the BJP said on Saturday that her ``theatrics'' could not whitewash the dark record of governance under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi who, between them, ruled the country for close to 20 years. Much of the economic, social, institutional and moral degradation in the
country today was directly attributable to their rule, the party said.
Naidu dismissed as laughable Sonia's statement that Indira and Rajiv Gandhi ``wanted a smile of happiness on every face in the country''. Long years of Congress misrule had brought a smile only on the faces of scamsters like Ottavio Quattrocchi and other wheeler-dealers, he said.
The party announced the names of seven more candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, including G Atmacharan Reddy (who left the Congress and joined the BJP last week) from Nizamabad in Andhra Pradesh. The other six are from Karnataka (V Hanumappa -- Kolar), Kerala (Raja Ravi Varma -- Thiruvananthapuram) and Rajasthan (Nihalchand Meghwal -- Sri Ganganagar, Shyam Lal Bairwa -- Tonk, Ramesh Chand Meena -- Sawai Madhopur, and Jaswant Singh Vishnoi -- Jodhpur).
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
