Walk your talk, BJP!

The Bharatiya Janata Party has not been missing any opportunity to condemn the United Progressive Alliance 1.0 and 2.0 governments, headed by its arch adversary the Indian National Congress, for being the most corrupt central governments from the time of the independence on the 15th August 1947. In the Guwahati rally the BJP has declared that it would fight the next general election on an anti-corruption plank. If it perseveres in its attack on the top leadership of the Congress party for being a silent spectator, if not a willing accomplice, when the public exchequer was being raided and robbed of Rs.2.25 lac crore or US$50 billion in just two scams, 2G spectrum and Commonwealth games, the Congress will have to ensure that the central government remained on its best and most honest behaviour for the remaining three years and four months of the five year term. In that the BJP will definitely be doing a service to the people of India.

But the BJP's call for probity in public life has a tone of hollowness around it. Mahatma Gandhi's life, as he had said, was his message. The BJP's life, on the contrary, is very different from its message. To be able to climb to the moral high ground and remain there, the BJP will have to come clean at least on its government in Karnataka which is headed by B.S. Yeddyurappa, whose actions in denotifying state land and allotting it to his own kin have been called immoral, yet not illegal, by the party chief Nitin Gadkari himself, and which includes the infamous Reddy brothers as ministers whose illegal mining activity has earned opprobrium from the Supreme Court appointed Central Empowered Committee.

If the BJP decides to jettison Yeddyurappa and the Reddy brothers, as it must, its government in the state will fall and its national coffers will also suffer because the largesse from the Reddys will be lost for ever. But that will be a small price to pay for establishing its credibility in the eyes of the Indian masses, which act, in the ultimate analysis, is going to be the difference between the winner and the also ran.