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BJP cheated allies and voters, says Gadgil; Congress not raising real issues, says Naidu

The Congress said today that the Bharatiya Janata Party has cheated its own followers by dropping its major programmes, and others by retaining an 'invisible agenda.'

Prime Minister A B Vajpayee's speech in the Lok Sabha yesterday was an indication of the turmoil going on within the BJP, and he would be under constant pressure, Congress party spokesman V N Gadgil said.

Vajpayee was not allowed to make Jaswant Singh the finance or even keep the finance portfolio with himself, Gadgil said. In the case of the speaker's election also, Vajpayee was overruled, he said.

According to Gadgil, Vajpayee and L K Advani were speaking in different languages. ''But it will be false to say that one is liberal and the other is rigid,'' he said. Both were controlled by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and were two aspects of the same personality, he said.

It was true that the BJP had no hidden agenda, but it had an invisible agenda and it was coming out now, Gadgil said. The letter written by the human resource development ministry secretary to implement the BJP manifesto and Advani's reference to the common civil code were examples, he said.

In the Lok Sabha poll, the BJP got 26 per cent votes, which meant that more than ten million people voted for it on the basis of Hindutva, Ayodhya, abolishing Article 370 and enacting a common civil code, he said. The party dropped everything for the sake of power and there had been no such betrayal, cheating and fraud before, he said.

Letters have started appearing in Pune newspapers protesting against the BJP's action and expressing symbolic resentment that they wanted to withdraw the votes given to the BJP, Gadgil said.

Meanwhile, the BJP criticised the Congress for adopting a negative attitude in Parliament, saying that instead of discussing substantive issues, it had been raising non-issues like ''hidden agenda'' or the alleged ''remote control'' of the government by the RSS.

The party, however, welcomed the statement by Congress president Sonia Gandhi at Tuesday's Congress Parliamentary Party meeting, asking Congressmen to play the role of a responsible and constructive opposition.

''Yet, we are pained to see that such positive pronouncements are rendered hollow by the Congress party's negative behaviour in the first session of Parliament,'' party general secretary M Venkaiah Naidu said in a statement.

He said Congress MPs had not raised any substantive issues concerning the country's governance either during the debate on the motion of confidence or the debate on the motion of thanks on the President's address to the joint session of Parliament.

The BJP leader said the Congress members were deliberately not raising issues concerning the country's governance as that would mean admission of their own misgovernance.

According to him, the Congress had not yet reconciled to the fact that it was in the Opposition and was behaving as if it was still in power. He said Sonia Gandhi's criticism of the BJP's role in the Lok Sabha Speaker's election was ''baseless''.

UNI

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