New Delhi, May 5: It was Sushma Swaraj’s Gandhigiri that won the day for the BJP on Monday. Or so the party believed. Last week, when AIADMK MP V Maithreyan was asked to withdraw from the House for defying the Chair during the Question Hour, the NDA, after a walkout, decided to keep their mouths shut. “The House rules prohibit the use of bands or stickers. But they couldn’t have stopped us from keeping our ‘fingers on the lips’ to register our protest,” said party deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, and the progenitor of the idea.

It was an encore on Monday when NDA’s silence “forced” the Speaker “to backtrack”. In their consultations early in the day party leader in the Lok Sabha L K Advani and deputy leader Vijay Kumar Malhotra found the idea effective. The idea got the NDA’s seal of approval later at a meeting chaired by Advani. There was a question over whether the BJP’s PM candidate would join the silent protest. “Advaniji said an emphatic yes, and it was quite a sight in the House,” said Sushma, who learnt about the episode later in the day.

After the obituary reference on Rajya Sabha MP Nirmala Deshpande’s death, the NDA MPs took to their protest and in less than a couple of minutes the Lok Sabha was adjourned till 2 p.m. “For a House used to noisy protests, it was a grotesque sight. The Speaker could not have done otherwise,” said a BJP MP.

Congress chief crisis manager Pranab Mukherjee had already got in touch with BJP’s Malhotra early in the day, with the larger view being that the matter was best resolved “at the earliest”. The political spectrum, save for the Left, had varying degrees of sympathy for the charged MPs.

In their informal meetings, and later the NDA meeting, the opposition alliance felt “that noisy protests would mean playing into the hands of those gunning for them”. “Gandhi redeemed us when we were being projected as his very anti-thesis,” said a BJP leader.