New Delhi, Oct 21– Strongly opposing the deal New Delhi inked with Dhaka last month to resolve the dispute over land boundary, India's opposition Bharatiya Janata Party threatened to nail down the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government on the issue during the winter session of the country's Parliament.
Advani is currently crisscrossing India campaigning against the country's Congress-led coalition government, headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He made the remark on Dhaka-Delhi land deal while addressing a public rally in Guwahati, the main city in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam on Thursday.
"Enough is enough. We will oppose it (the land deal between Bangladesh and India) tooth and nail during the winter session of Parliament and ask for explanation from the government," said veteran BJP leader and former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani.
Though the BJP protested against the Delhi-Dhaka land deal and staged agitations in Assam, Advani was the first national leader of the party to speak against it, turning it into yet another weapon for the opposition to attack the government.
India's central government has been facing an onslaught from the opposition over a series of alleged corruption scandals that came to the fore over the past couple of years.
During Singh's visit to Dhaka on Sep 6 and 7, Bangladesh and India signed a protocol to be added to the land boundary agreement the two neighbours had inked in 1974. The protocol was inked to settle long-pending disputes between the two countries over some stretches of the more than 4096 kilometre long border.
Advani said that Singh had not taken him or any other opposition leader into confidence before New Delhi had inked the land deal with Dhaka. "Two days before the Prime Minister went to Bangladesh (in September), many of my party leaders and I were invited to accompany him. But we were not told that Assam's land would be given to Bangladesh," said the senior BJP leader.
"If we knew Assam's land was being given away we would have protested before the land agreement was signed between the two countries," he added.
Advani's nationwide campaign or Jan Chetana Yatra was being seen by political analysts as a move to re-position himself as the prime-ministerial candidate from his party for the 2014 parliamentary elections in India.
Bangladesh and India have been negotiating the deals to settle the issues related to enclaves, adverse to possession of land and portions of un-demarcated border ever since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made her landmark visit to Delhi in January 2010.
The deal, however, triggered protests in Assam, with some social organisations and political parties alleging that India's central government had given away the state's land to Bangladesh without taking consent of the State Assembly, Parliament or the people living on the border.
Chief Minister of Assam Tarun Gogoi, however, said that the State did not lose, but gained in the deal, which sought to resolve the decades-old boundary dispute between the two neighbouring countries.
Gogoi is one of the four Chief Ministers, who accompanied Singh to Dhaka on the latter's two day official visit to Bangladesh. The others were Mukul Sangma of Meghalaya, Lal Thanhawla of Mizoram and Manik Sarkar of Tripura.
The Congress, which leads the coalition government in the Centre in New Delhi, is also in power in Assam, Meghalaya and Mizoram, while Tripura is ruled by a coalition of Communist Party of India (Marxist) and other leftist parties.
The Assam Gana Parishad, a regional political party in Assam, said that the central government in New Delhi and state administration, headed by Gogoi, were misguiding the people of the state, after giving away land to Bangladesh without consulting residents of the areas along the border between the two countries.
The All Assam Students' Union, an organisation with influences in Brahmaputra Valley, staged road-blockades to protest against the deal.
Advani on Thursday said that the central government of India had no right to give away Assam's land to Bangladesh without taking the Parliament into confidence.
news detiels from: www.bdnews24.com
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