The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani accused the government on Sunday of going "soft" in its approach to what he described as cross-border terrorism from Pakistan.
L.K. Advani said the coalition government led by the Congress party had "neither the political will nor the clarity of policy".
"The government's soft and compromising approach to cross-border terrorism ... has endangered India's internal security like never before," Advani told about 8,000 party members.
On Sunday the party concluded a three-day meeting in Nagpur ahead of parliamentary elections in April and May.
A heated war of words between India and Pakistan since the attacks in Mumbai in November that killed 179 people has raised criticism the government was caught off-guard.
Reproaching the government for not making Islamabad "feel the heat", Advani said if elected to power, the BJP will follow a "zero-tolerance and zero-compromise approach" to terrorism.
The Mumbai attack, he said, was "not so much a case of intelligence failure as governance failure".
Internal squabbles and state poll losses have dented the BJP's momentum ahead of the upcoming general elections.
The Congress party has also lost a string of state elections, partly because of inflation and its perceived weak leadership, and has come under criticism for the terror attacks, which India says was planned from a camp in Pakistan.
The BJP, which rose to prominence in the early 1990s on the back of a Hindu revivalist movement, on Saturday reiterated its commitment to building a temple which has been a flashpoint of tension between Hindus and Muslims for years.
Hindu hardliners say a Ram temple in Ayodhya, the site of a 16th century mosque torn down by mobs in 1992, was destroyed by Muslim invaders centuries ago and a mosque built in its place.
About 3,000 people were killed after Hindu mobs destroyed the mosque in some of India's worst Hindu-Muslim riots.
In response, the Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, in a rally in New Delhi on Sunday, said a party that attempted to woo voters in the name of religion could not fight terror.
No comments:
Post a Comment