In an article in which he points out the ‘flaws’ with the Congress’s campaign for Gujarat, Prakash Karat also hits out at L.K. Advani’s ‘hopes’. “If some of the secular opponents of the BJP were mistaken in underestimating the deep communal impact in Gujarat, the hopes of L.K. Advani that Gujarat marks ‘a turning point’ in national politics is also misplaced. Advani cannot have forgotten what happened in 2003. After the BJP’s victories in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, Advani and the BJP leadership decided to go in for an early Lok Sabha election. They expected the momentum of the assembly elections to carry them back into office. Instead, to their surprise, they faced defeat. Just as the Congress party is being punished by the people in the states where it rules, the BJP should be apprehensive of what it will have to face in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh that go to the polls later in 2008. The record of the BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh is one of misrule and corruption; of policies brazenly promoting the interests of the big capitalists and contractors, intimidation of minorities and repression of popular movements. The BJP government in Rajasthan has set a dubious record of 47 police firings in which 43 people died, including 16 farmers. Gujarat has escaped the pendulum shift between the BJP and the Congress precisely because it is an exception. Though Advani keeps talking about making Himachal Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states another Gujarat, the reality is that the BJP has pathetically failed to prove that there is even a semblance that it is a ‘party with a difference’”.

... contd.