President's decision to appoint Gujral against the spirit of the Constitution: Advani

Bharatiya Janata Party president Lal Kishinchand Advani feels President Shankar Dayal Sharma's decision to appoint Inder Kumar Gujral as prime minister and to give the United Front a second chance to form a government was absolutely against the spirit of democracy and the Constitution.

In an interview to Home TV, Advani said Dr Sharma did not make any serious offer to the BJP to form the government.

The offer, Advani said, was made in a manner that it could be claimed that ''we offered them also''. He claimed that the BJP could have formed the government if it wanted to. ''If we had really tried we could have formed the government, but the BJP didn't want to do so,'' he said.

The BJP leader revealed that Atal Bihari Vajpayee and he had told Dr Sharma that it would be ''unprecedented, unethical and unacceptable'' to call the United Front, which had been defeated in Parliament, to form a government. Although there was no Constitutional bar he said there were things in parliamentary practice which were not laid down in the Constitution or in the rules of procedures.

''It is the President who in his wisdom took a certain decision and now we should face the government," Advani said, adding that his party would not make an issue of the Presidential decision.

The President, he felt, was more concerned about avoiding another general election as he did not want to be seen as imposing it so soon.

The Gujral government, Advani said, was unlikely to survive 1997 and hence the BJP was gearing up for the next general election. His target as party president was to win in southern and eastern India, he said, adding, ''I can tell you that in places like Tamil Nadu, Kerala or Andhra Pradesh, the election this time will yield surprising results.''

In another conversation with journalists in Calcutta on Sunday, Advani said the BJP was in the process of extending the present BJP-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance in Uttar Pradesh to some other states. The BJP and its allies, he said, would face the next election unitedly. He claimed that the initiative for such an alliance had come from the regional parties. The BJP, he said, had never craved for such an alliance.

He also made it clear that there was no question of the BJP diluting its ''Hindu appeal.'' The masses, he felt, did not agree with the view of a certain section of the elite who had a distorted perception of secularism.

"It is the masses who are responsible for the BJP's phenomenal growth during the last ten years, therefore, I am not going to do anything, I mean anything, not even take up the facade of liberalisation which undermines the BJP's principal strength,'' Advani said.