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Jammu's the stage for RSS vs BJP battle

Josy Joseph in Jammu

On the altar of the Great Indian Election, the right-wingers are loosening up, their baggage of ideology packed away. In full public view, they are screaming and hurling abuses at each other.

Worse, there is no end in sight to this ugly pre-election scrambling between the favourite and the youngest child of the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh and its oldest and most maligned political arm.

The RSS-backed Jammu State Morcha and its right-wing brother the Bharatiya Janata Party have for all practical purposes parted ways, as both try independent rides on the wave of Jammu's age-old complaint of state neglect and discrimination.

The JSM, demanding statehood for the Jammu region, says it would not withdraw any candidate from all the three seats in Jammu town, while the BJP insiders speak of a possible last-minute patch up to finalise a tie up announced in New Delhi.

The electoral alliance that the BJP and the JSM had announced in Delhi is not visible here on the ground. And the two are going out their own way, splitting the right wing votes and assuring some pleasant surprises for candidates from other parties.

Says Ramesh Pappa, a national general secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad and an active JSM campaigner: "We have three candidates in the city. The Morcha position is clear: we are not going to withdraw any candidate."

The JSM has fielded a university professor (Dr Virendra Gupta from Jammu West) and two advocates (Onkar Seth from Cantonment and Tilak Raj Sharma) to test the waters, as the RSS takes a deep plunge into the hurly-burly of electoral politics.

The Sangha Parivar has clearly overcome its inhibitions about elections: Its Jammu and Kashmir chief Sreekumar heads the JSM. For the record he is no more the JK unit chief of the RSS. But that is just for the record.

The JSM was born out an RSS resolution in June this year in Kurukshetra, where the organisation decided to launch a front demanding statehood for Jammu.

Pappa told rediff.com that the SJM was not holding any "secret parleys" with the BJP to firm up a last-minute alliance.

Monday is the last day for withdrawal of nominations for the Jammu town's three constituencies that go to polls in the second phase.

Gireesh Joyal, an organisational secretary of the SJM, told rediff.com that his party was extending support to "candidates based on their stand towards the demand for the reorganisation of the state."

Thus, he claims, the two seats won by the Ladakh Union Territory Front demanding Union Territory status for the Buddhist majority region belong to the "SJM alliance."

"We are also extending support to several candidates in the Kashmir Valley, all of them nationalist Muslims who are for the division of the state into three," Joyal says. He wouldn't reveal their names fearing threat to their lives.

"A common symbol may be a problem, as several of our candidates are contesting as independents. But we have candidates in most constituencies," he adds.

Jammu and Kashmir Elections 2002: The complete coverage

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