The leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party concedes privately that Shiv Sainiks might have been involved in a big way in the terrible riots that shook Mumbai in 1993. And it cannot but acknowledge that often the writings, speeches and even actions of the Shiv Sena chief, Bal Thackeray, are extremely communal and provocative. But having conceded this, the BJP leaders ask: why did the Congress, which was then in government in Maharashtra, not take ... action against Thackeray? Why did the then Congress government overlook the alleged provocative writings in Saamna, Shiv Sena mouthpiece?

And the answers are also supplied by a senior party leader. "The fact is, and the Congress party knows it, no one can dare take action against the Sena chief". It is implicitly acknowledged that action against him could be taken only at the risk of Mumbai burning like hell.

The BJP's leadership's argument goes like this: the BJP will naturally not take any action; after all, the Shiv Sena is the party's ally ... but the important thing is that the Congress ... leadership knows that such an action could result in riots worse than what was witnessed earlier.

... It cannot be denied that the Shiv Sena had all the makings of a monster even way back in the Fifties when it launched an anti-Tamilian stir in Mumbai ... The slogan was that Maharashtra was for Maharashtrians.

At that time there was no BJP and the Jana Sangh had only a marginal, virtually negligible presence in the country. In Maharashtra, it had no presence at all. Why did the Congress allow this monster to grow?

At the same time, the BJP's leadership, which had been riding on its high horse, can ignore the severe strictures against its alliance partner in Maharashtra by a judicial commission only at its peril ...

The party had been forced to get off its high horse even before it established its government at New Delhi – its alliances with ... all and sundry ... were a loud and clear signal that henceforth petty morality or high ethics would not be allowed to come in the way of the party seeking and retaining power. Ignoring the findings of a judicial commission, or even rubbishing it, as the BJP has done, fits in well with the new image of the party, which is ruthless in nursing power.

The BJP is also annoyed at the Commission connecting the demolition of the Babari Masjid at Ayodhya to the explosions in Mumbai and the riots that followed. Its leadership prefers to propagate the myth that the demolition did not lead to any communal violence. It ignores the terrible happenings in Surat and elsewhere and turns a blind eye to the fact that at Ayodhya itself ... gangs of Bajrang Dal youth ... set fire to small mosques in the town and attacking Muslim families.

And the stark truth is that there is not much difference between the Shiv Sena's political agenda and that of the BJP. The Sena is only a cruder version of the BJP. Both are wedded to an anti-Muslim, anti-minority agenda. And now that they have acquired some political muscle, the BJP is not going to allow the report of a Commission to legally denounce its own type of politics as "communal".

The BJP will not allow, if it can help it, a Commission's findings to label its own alliance partner as the murderer of Muslims.                                           (Source: The Hindu, 16 August, 1998)