NEW DELHI, April 19: The crisis in which the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition was plunged yesterday seemed only to deepen today. Communications Minister Buta Singh refused to quit, Samata Party leader and Railways Minister Nitish Kumar joined the chorus orchestrated by Jayalalitha to drop all tainted ministers and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee sent off Bhairon Singh Shekhawat on yet another mission to mollify Jayalalitha.Though it was learnt that the Prime Minister has decided to seek Buta' s resignation, the latter queered the pitch for the BJP by insisting there was no reason for him to quit and even if he has to bow out then others like L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi too should go out along with him. ``I met the Prime Minister yesterday and he assured me that a decision would be taken only after examining the Supreme Court judgement,'' he said making it clear he would resist any pressure to put in his papers. ``Why am I being singled out by the media and others? After all there are othernames also such as Ram Jethmalani, Ramakrishna Hegde, L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi,'' he said without elaborating.Singh asserted that there was no reason for him to resign if others named by Jayalalitha did not. ``Everybody should be judged with the same yardstick.if the others think of quitting, I will do what I have to do.''To add to the BJP's worries, Kumar of Samata Party too seemed to support the `one-principle-for-all' line of thinking. Kumar told reporters in Patna today that Cabinet members charged in corruption cases should be dropped. ``There cannot be double standards on the issue of corruption,'' he said. He made it clear that he was against the removal of ministers charged in cases which were political in nature. Making a distinction between the two sets of cases, he said: ``Chargesheets filed with political motivations are quite different from those served in corruption cases.''Faced with these contradictions that are threatening to get out of hand, Prime Minister Vajpayee senthis trusted friend and Rajasthan Chief Minister Shekhawat apparently with his responses to Jayalalitha's demands in the letter she despatched to him yesterday. Shekhawat left for Chennai on Sunday morning hoping to pull off a coup a la his Rajasthan colleague Jaswant Singh who prevailed upon Jayalalitha to join the government in March.Shekhawat has been asked to convey to Jayalalitha, albeit in a gentle fashion, the inability to sack Hegde and Jethmalani as they were merely facing cases, and had not been charge-sheeted. It is likely that he will tell Jayalalitha to show more patience with her demand of dismissal of the Tamil nadu government.Last night, senior leaders of the BJP, including Union Home Minister Advani, Jaswant Singh and Shekhawat met at Vajpayee's residence to discuss the package that would pacify Jayalalitha. It also decided to seek controversial godman Chandraswami's help to deal with Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy who, these leaders feel, was behind the Government's recenttroubles.Meanwhile, Jethmalani today attacked Jayalalitha and asked Vajpayee to call her bluff and not to succumb to any of her pressure tactics. ``The Prime minister should not hesitate to tell Jayalalitha that enough is enough. If she wants, she can leave the government. The government will survive even without her,'' he claimed.
