All-party meet fails to break deadlock in Parliament

Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee told mediapersons after the meeting that a message should go from the Prime Minister to bring down communal tension.

Sushil Indora (INLD) said "we are with Mamata Banerjee. And if BJP has any agenda of its own, we will not allow it to be imposed on NDA".

The NDA constituents’ tough posture comes in the wake of Vajpayee’s reported remarks yesterday that the temple could be constructed at the site of the demolished disputed structure at Ayodhya and a mosque could be built elsewhere.

Congress chief whip P R Dasmunshi and RJD leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh said that NDA partners Trinamool Congress, TDP and INLD wanted Vajpayee to "withdraw" his remarks. Singh said his party would not allow Parliament to function till the issue was resolved.

CPI-M Leader Somnath Chatterjee said Vajpayee’s statements "more serious" than the scope of the debate demanded by the Congress under rule 184 which entails voting.

Terming the Prime Minister’s remarks as "uncalled for", Dasmunshi said they had given a "new dimension" involving the judiciary too.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pramod Mahajan is understood to have told the meeting that he would convey the feelings of the members to the Prime Minister.

The CPI(M) today deplored the Prime Minister’s statement on the Ayodhya issue, saying this showed he ignored the assurance given to the people that his government would take up only those programmes which are included in the NDA agenda.

In a statement here, CPI(M) general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet said Vajpayee had assured the people that contentious issues like Ayodhya, uniform civil code and abrogation of Article 370 would not be taken up by his government.

"With his new statement that temple will be constructed at the site where mosque was demolished, Vajpayee has completely ignored all protests by the opposition as well as his allies in parliament," Surjeet said.

"Such comments will only add fuel to the fire," he said adding that it was not accidental that all Sangh Parivar outfits welcomed the statement while secular-minded people condemned it.

Two former Prime Ministers V P Singh and H D Deve Gowda today criticised Prime Minister for his remarks on temple construction and described it as a "calculated move" to divert focus from economic issues and derive political mileage in Uttar Pradesh elections.

Singh told reporters that Vajpayee made the remarks as part of "diversionary tactics" to escape opposition attack on government’s economic policies particularly on the agriculture front as a number of farmers were facing starvation and had even committed suicide.