The BJP leadership on Monday officially condemned the blast on the Samjhauta Express and reiterated its demand for “a more stringent Bill than POTA to tackle the scourge of terrorism”. But privately, party leaders claimed that the timing of the tragedy would certainly help the party win the Uttarakhand Assembly elections, campaign for which ended today.

The BJP’s election campaign centered round attacking the “combination of Manmohan’s economics and Sachar’s politics,” a senior leader said. If Manmohan Singh’s economics was responsible for the escalating prices of food items, the Sachar Committee report was evidence of the UPA government’s Muslim “appeasement” policies, he added.

The BJP, which has always sought to link “terrorism” with so-called “Muslim appeasement,” feels that the attack on Samjhauta Express on the eve of the Uttarakhand polls will help the party gain votes on the national security issue.

In fact, from the outset of the poll campaign, the BJP has been harping on the increased threats to national security since the UPA came to power.

Apart from attacking the N D Tiwari government of incompetence and corruption, BJP leaders trained their guns on Central government policies on both the economic and security fronts.

The BJP’s calculation has been that given the large numbers of ex-servicemen in both the Garhwal and Kumaon regions of Uttarakhand, questions of national security evoke a special resonance in the state.

BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is in charge of Uttarakhand, had told The Indian Express before leaving for the poll campaign that “in view of the military tradition in the hills, there is a great sense of disgust on the way the Congress has been soft on terrorism.” The Mohamad Afzal issue was, therefore, invoked during the poll campaign to capitalise on this “sense of disgust.”

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