Says Leader of the Opposition and party stalwart L.K. Advani, “We will go to the people and tell them that all sorts of compromises are being made with Pakistan under pressure from the United States.”

The proposal to have a joint mechanism on terror with Pakistan, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced in Havana during the Non-Aligned Meet, is according to the party an illustration of how the United States is leaning on India to accommodate Pakistan.

The issue also is of showing that the government was intent on dealing with the crisis, and the POTA law was one such way of demonstrating that. As BJP president Rajnath Singh says, there was always a need for a law against terrorism, but after doing away with POTA, the government did not make an alternative legislation.

According to BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley, who is also secretary of the party’s parliamentary board, internal security was being linked to vote bank politics which was evident in Kashmir. “It is completely wrong to talk about demilitarisation in Kashmir, because that would be appeasing a political ally, which is dangerous for the country’s sovereignty,” he says.

The implication is that the government could now be heading for a “second round of mistakes” in Kashmir, where coalition partners Congress and the PDP do not see eye to eye. And where the government could have been stronger, it is deliberately weakening its own case as the intelligence coordination group, the technological committees, and the task force on intelligence that could have been helpful and were so during the NDA regime, are now “defunct”.

... contd.