BJP cancels rallies after Centre's security warning

The BJP today put on hold all except two of the 13 rallies it had planned across the country to highlight the deteriorating internal security situation, ironically due to a warning by National Security Advisor M K Narayanan that there was a threat to Leader of the Opposition L K Advani's life.

The party would be announcing the new scheduling of the rallies after March 20, said senior party leader Sushma Swaraj.

After a full day of dithering on how to react to this enhanced threat perception, the party decided to go ahead with the Jabalpur rally, to be addressed by Advani on Wednesday, and the one in Davangere in Karnataka on February 13, and put on hold all others.

While sources confirm that a decision to go ahead with the rally in Jabalpur was made yesterday, the fate of the rest of the rallies was not so clear, with the rally in Rampur in Uttar Pradesh being the only one which was called off.

"Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh is a BJP-ruled state where the bandobast can be controlled. The Uttar Pradesh government, on the other hand, has made it very clear that the state government cannot guarantee an incident-less event," said a top source.

The party was floundering on how to react to the situation. "If we cancel the rallies, it will appear that all our talk of being tough on terror is just that "" talk. If we go ahead and something happens, the government would be well within its rights to say that we had been warned," said a source.

Party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar appeared confused over the future course of events and even denied that the NSA had met Advani.