BJP president Rajnath Singh said the BJP will make ‘minority appeasement’ a major election plank in Uttar Pradesh. “The UPA’s policy of appeasement does not benefit anyone,” he said. Two obvious points the party will make during the Uttar Pradesh campaign are: the erroneous basis of the Sachar Committee and the so-called Muslim headcount, and the special allocation for minorities in the Budget. Even though the Left parties do not have a major political influence in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP plans to highlight the points raised in the CPM’s charter for ‘Advancement of the Muslim Community’ as an instance of ‘blatant appeasement of Muslims’. Incidentally, Singh will be addressing the BJP’s Minority Morcha on Wednesday.

According to Vijay Kumar Malhotra, BJP’s spokesman in Parliament, the Congress and the Left had virtually discarded the term ‘minority’ and were using ‘Muslim’ in an effort to dip into the critical Muslim vote bank ahead of the Uttar Pradesh polls, while Ram Vilas Paswan had raised the demand for a Muslim chief minister in the state and the Samajwadi Party was practising divisive politics.

“This is not advancement of a community, this is communalism. Why is it necessary to alienate a section of the country as was being done before Independence. The CPM talks of perverted secularism. These parties are not talking about benefiting Muslims, it is about being anti-Hindu. This will become a key issue in the Uttar Pradesh polls,” Malhotra said. Incidentally, the subject of an aggressive back-to-basics campaign plank has been under discussion in the party for a while and was discussed during the party’s national council and national executive meetings last year.

The strategy for the elections will be finalised in the course of meetings between M. Venkaiah Naidu, who has been put in charge of the party’s election set-up in the state, and other leaders heading the different regional election units that the party has created for the polls.

It is also expected that Kalyan Singh’s name as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate will be announced ahead of the elections, making a break from the usual practice of leaving the official announcement to a meeting of the newly elected legislature party in case the BJP wins.

The pull towards a Hindu votebase was witnessed recently by the party in the Punjab polls where it performed exceptionally well, winning 19 of the 23 seats it contested. The party believes that urban Hindus, for whom rising prices are a major issue, had rejected the stand that minorities and especially Muslims would have the first right to resources. “The open appeasement did not go down well with the voters,” said a party leader. There was also a conscious effort to draw Hindu voters in areas like Ludhiana and Jullunder, by bringing Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to campaign there. The Akalis and the BJP won all assembly seats from those areas.

In raising the Hindutva banner, the BJP was also working in tandem with the RSS. On Tuesday, at a preparatory meeting of the RSS in Lucknow ahead of the Sangh’s annual meeting starting later this week in the Uttar Pradesh capital, speakers pointed to “open and shameless minority politics.” According to RSS national executive member Ram Madhav, there was no need to talk of minority appeasement any more as the UPA and its allies were “openly talking of Muslims”.

The support from the RSS will be important in the elections__the sangh recently completed a year-long campaign in connection with the centenary celebrations of their second chief Guru Golwalkar, focusing on Hindu consolidation, minority appeasement and internal security. The BJP is expected to benefit from the campaign.

Taking a hardline position on the issue comes even though the BJP has been shy of making use of Ayodhya and Godhra in their political campaigns. But by bringing the focus on the purported anti-Hindu stand of the UPA and its allies, the BJP is also hoping to gain from the consolidation of Muslim and Hindu votes.