BJP’s UP rewrite is in Urdu

The Urdu media cell is a ‘‘first-time experiment’’ and is being replicated across Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has set up Urdu cells in eight centres where the Muslim vote is important and Urdu papers aplenty.

These include Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Agra, Jhansi, Kanpur, Ghaziabad and Meerut, apart from Lucknow. In each centre, Urdu-knowing journalists or professors have been specially appointed to help the party make inroads into hitherto virgin territory. The ‘‘Urdu teams’’ are not paid employees but ‘‘sympathisers’’ who have been mobilised by the party’s Minority Cell.

Apart from press releases and articles, the BJP has also issued full-page advertisements in the two-dozen odd Urdu newspapers in UP, focussing on Vajpayee’s ‘‘friendship with Pakistan’’ (complete with pix of a Vajpayee-Jamali hug) and the India-Pakistan cricket series.

The walls of Hazratganj in Lucknow are plastered with Vajpayee posters with the message written in Urdu, and Urdu pamphlets and booklets highlighting his achievements are being distributed across the state.

Jha, an RSS pracharak, admits that ‘‘we are using Urdu for the first time in our campaign’’ and says the decision has the full backing of the Sangh Parivar. More than Vajpayee, it is RSS sarsanghchalak K S Sudershan’s message that ‘‘we cannot run this country without the support of 15 crore Muslims’’ that has gone down to the shakhas, Jha says.

But in off-the-record conversations, BJP leaders admit that the Urdu blitzkrieg has less to do with ideological shift than electoral expediency. ‘‘We do not expect Muslims to support the BJP in big numbers but we are aiming at two things—that they do not vote en bloc only to defeat the BJP as they have in the past, and that their vote gets divided between the SP, BSP, and Congress,’’ a senior BJP leader said.

The BJP leaders claim their strategy to confuse Muslims about Mulayam Singh Yadav’s intentions is working. Vajpayee’s recent comment that the BJP and SP had no ideological differences and George Fernandes’s follow-up remark that Mulayam Singh was an old friend were part of this plan, BJP leaders concede.

‘‘You see, there are at least 23 seats in UP where the Muslim vote determines the outcome. We realised that if we manage to divide this vote, we can increase our tally to 35 or even 40 seats,’’ a party functionary said, reeling off the list of seats where this tactic is at work.

With the ‘‘feel-good’’ card failing in UP and even the so-called ‘‘Atal wave’’ barely visible even in Lucknow, the BJP is banking almost solely on vote division to improve its tally.

The Urdu offensive is very much part of that strategy. Even a marginal shift of Muslim vote to the party will only be an ‘‘additional bonus,’’ leaders admit.