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Onkar Singh in New Delhi
The Bhartiya Janata Party which had sacked K R Malkani as the editor of BJP Today for his controversial statement on Nepal has decided to turn a blind eye to the faux pas committed by Prafulla Goradia, now the editor of the same paper.
"What is there to take action against him. He has already expressed his regret over the error and this has settled the issue," senior BJP leader Pyare Lal Khandelwal told rediff.com.
Goradia in a leading article on his trip to China had printed a map of India that clearly showed portions of Jammu and Kashmir as part of China and Pakistan respectively.
"It was an oversight. I took the map from a book, The Chinese by John Murray of London. I did not think that there could be something wrong with the map as book had been imported officially into India," Goradia told a leading national daily as part of his defence.
But senior leaders of BJP admit in private conversation that Goradia had committed a blunder. "Imagine if the same thing had been printed elsewhere our party would have gone to town and demanded the arrest of the culprit," said a BJP member of parliament.
The logic advanced is that when Malkani could be taken to task why give a long rope of Goradia.
"He should have known the map of India. And where was the need to take map of India from a foreign publication," he argued.
Malkani had told the media that in the early fifties Nepal King had told Nehru to take over India and merge it with the Indian Union.
Both Malkani and Goradia were not available for comment on the matter. Incidentally it is Goradia himself who is the overall in-charge of the publication and decides the editorial contents.
He occasionally takes advice from the BJP president Jana Krishnamurthy.
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