A party in search of political relevance must choose its national agendas wisely. But wisdom was not particularly conspicuous in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s decision to first endorse and then join the Vishwa Hindu Parishad-sponsored national campaign against the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project. On Wednesday, the VHP’s agitation kicked up a fair amount of dust, creating traffic jams, disrupting trains and generally spreading chaos in places as far apart as Jalandhar, Indore and Coimbatore. By participating in it, the BJP has only betrayed its own lack of focus and political imagination. With a mid-term poll a distinct possibility, it is simply unbelievable that the country’s main opposition party should choose to waste its time, attention and energies by clambering on to a revanchist bandwagon. It could well have done this in the belief that such a campaign would help fuel its way back to power in New Delhi, but that would be a serious misreading of the national mood. Are voters to assume from its latest preoccupations that the BJP has no other serious and substantive concerns at this point in time? Are they to presume that the UPA is doing just fine, apart of course from pushing ahead with a multi-crore shipping canal project? Is the party not perturbed about government’s policy record? Does the shabby state of infrastructure — given its own avowed commitment to bijli, sadak, paani — not provoke the party into political action? What about large-scale corruption in social welfare projects? Are none of these issues worthy of the BJP’s attention?The BJP’s chronic inability to focus on the urgent concerns of the day does not, however, exonerate the Central government’s flat-footed handling of the Sethusamudram controversy. One of its affidavits before the apex court, authored by the Archaeological Survey of India, seems to say there is no historical proof that characters of the Ramayana existed. This is incredibly silly. Who vets the Centre’s court submissions? All that the affidavit needed to say was that the ‘Ramar Sethu’ structure is a natural formation, and append the wealth of scientific evidence attesting to this fact. The affidavit’s over-enthusiasm will complicate Sethu politics further. No one will benefit. Not the Opposition. Not the government. And certainly not the country.
