BJP 's slogan of a "stable government and able leader" has taken a severe beating as the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led coalition limps towards completing its first 100 days in office on June 26.

However going into the Lok Sabha elections with the promise of providing a stable government and an able Prime Minister,, the BJP is becoming painfully aware that the developments of the last three months have only underlined the hollowness of the slogan.

After their espoused the two themes together the party is now trying to delink them. While BJP sources admit that the party's claim to provide a stable government may have been dented by the pulls and pressures of coalition politics, its claim of providing an able leadership has not suffered a setback as yet, they contend.

If anything the nuclear tests have shown the capacity of the BJP Government to make India stand up and be counted among the comity of nations that matters, the BJP leaders claim. At a more political level, they argue, the people still view the Prime Minister as "untested" with the pulls and pressures of coalition and Opposition politics preventing him from functioning ...

Even if the BJP disputes it, what is perhaps equally significant is that the party has begun to react, and assess the reactions, on such issues.

There is little doubt that the party's stability plank cracked right in the beginning ... The BJP's dream objective of appropriating the stability card once claimed by the Congress lay in a shambles.

In the process, its slogan of an "able Prime Minister" and "able leader" has also received a drubbing. Significantly, it was the BJP's own parent body, the RSS, which underlined this when it reportedly put its foot down on Mr. Vajpayee's choice of Mr. Jaswant Singh as Finance Minister.

In the event, the BJP-led coalition appeared to be no  different from the United Front (UF) it constantly ridiculed ... If the Gowda regime was "unstable" from the outset, the Gujral Government was a "daily wages Government" which would collapse any day, it said, scoffing the outside support given by a numerically larger Congress to a ragtag Janata Dal as a case of the "tail wagging the dog." ... BJP ... consciously tried to recast the coalition theory to justify its stand. It began to claim that a core of a numerically stronger party would impart stability to a coalition experiment.

But as it steps into its 100 days in office, the BJP's contention does not seem to be working any better than that of the "tail wagging the dog" as the single largest party tries to keep its dozen pre-poll and nearly half-a-dozen post-poll allies and Independent supporters together.