By IANS,
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) indicated Thursday it would not shy away from putting a spanner in the Congress’ efforts to garner support of parties outside the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
The Congress is trying hard to get support of the Samajwadi Party’s 39 members of parliament and some other smaller parties in case Left parties execute their threat of withdrawing support of their 61 MPs over the India-US nuclear deal.
BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar told IANS Thursday: “We had sent our senior leader Jaswant Singh to meet Amar Singh(general secretary of Samajwadi party) to convince him that it would be a major blunder for them to go along with the Congress party.”
Former BJP chief and key party strategist Venkaiah Naidu said his party would try to convince those political parties that may come around to supporting the nuclear deal that they should not do so in the larger political interest.
Naidu said:” We want this government to go at the earliest not only on the nuclear deal issue but also on due to its failure on several other fronts such as inflation and internal security.”
Commenting on the possibility of the UNPA (United National progressive Alliance), a loose coalition of smaller regional parties that includes the Samajwadi Party, supporting the Congress over the nuclear deal, Naidu said: “UNPA is a temporary parking place.”
He termed the UNPA as “Union of Non Performing Assets”, questioning the political stability of the so-called third front itself.
The BJP leader said: “We will see what UNPA decides.”
Naidu said he would not like to react on the terms and conditions of the proposed political agreement between the Samajwadi Party and the Congress. “I don’t want to comment on the speculative information without confirmation. This is not our business. We are watching the situation closely. Let’s see what kind of deal they are doing,” he said.
Naidu reiterated his party’s stand on the India-US nuclear deal issue. “The deal in present form is against the national interest.”