The Bharatiya Janata Party is launching Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its anti-terror icon by organising a public meeting on Friday evening in a park close to the site of the first bomb blast in Delhi weekend.
The public meeting will be also addressed by BJP's prime ministerial candidate Lal Krishna Advani and BJP president Rajnath Singh is to kick off the party's poll campaign for the Delhi assembly elections due in November.
The decision to present Modi as the champion of stern laws and actions against terrorists in the upcoming assembly elections in various states and to team him up with Advani in the parliamentary elections to mount an "aggressive nationalism" agenda was taken at the party's national executive in Bengaluru last Saturday.
Both Advani and Modi will go to the site of the blast and then visit the bylane in Karol Bagh, that had the maximum victims killed, to sympathise with the families.
They will then address the public meeting in the nearby Ajmal Khan Park.
Though a part of 160 Vijay Sankalp (Victory Pledge) rallies across the country that were flagged off by the Advani-Modi duo with one in Bengaluru on Saturday, the party has declared Delhi's public meeting as an anti-terror rally to capitalise on the serial bomb blasts in the capital.
The party wants to send a message to the citizens as to how insecure and unsafe they are under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance regime, the BJP sources affirmed.
They said Modi will be aggressively campaigning across the country in the elections as the BJP's mascot ready to take on the terrorists to send a clear message of the party's determination to pursue a stern policy of elimination of terrorism from the country.
No surprise that commentators are wondering whether Advani is preparing Modi as the furure home minister of the country, the sources added.
On the eve of the rally planned by Advani to project Modi as the tough face of BJP against terrorism, Congress spokesman Manish Tiwari lashed out against both, holding them "responsible for indigenous terrorism in the country."
He asserted that the youth were forced into terror activities because of the injustices, the foundation of which was laid by Advani with the Babri mosque demolition in 1992 that triggered the 1993 Mumbai riots, with the second injustice coming in 2002 with the Gujarat riots and the "miscarriage of justice in not bringing the guilty to law books."