New Delhi, Aug. 1 (The Telegrap): The BJP has decided to tread "cautiously" on Yakub Memon's execution and is yet unlikely to use it in its pre-poll discourse in Bihar.
Sources said there were two main reasons for this: first, its major Bihar opponents, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar, have not said a word on the hanging and its aftermath.
Second, they said, the feedback from the "ground" was that voters were more likely to be persuaded by "do-able promises" on bread-and-butter issues.
"Our information is, after the Muzaffarpur rally (addressed by Narendra Modi on July 25), many in the audience had asked what good is it for the Prime Minister to run down Lalu Prasad and Nitish? He has done it before, so why repeat it? We expected him to say something substantive and deliver on his promises," a BJP legislator from Bihar said.
The BJP's first impulse was to project the hanging as a "test of nationalism" by drawing a distinction between those who spoke out against the sentence and by inference, "sympathised" with a "terrorist", and others who supported it.
Later, its leaders took a call against tapping the issue's emotive potential, worried that such a tactic might give a carte blanche to the party's hardliners as well as those from the Sangh parivar to say what they wished to and provoke serious retaliation from politicians like Asaduddin Owaissi, the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief who spoke up publicly against Yakub's death penalty.
"Such a strategy may have created law and order problems," a source said.
The BJP lost little time in dissociating itself from its Bengal veteran and now Tripura governor Tathagata Roy who, on Friday, had tweeted that intelligence agencies should keep a tab on all those who had attended Yakub's funeral, except for relatives and close friends. "Many are potential terrorists," Roy had declared.
At a media briefing today, when central minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was asked about the tweet, he said: "He (Roy) has ceased to be a member of the BJP and holds a constitutional position. His office has the necessary machinery to respond to your questions."
The leading lights of the Hindi heartland have watched their steps on the Yakub affair. Samajwadi president Mulayam Singh Yadav has suspended a Maharashtra party official for demanding that Yakub's widow, Raheen, be nominated to the Rajya Sabha.
