NEW DELHI, Oct 21: Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee launched a withering attack on the rightwing religious hawks in his party on Sunday, veering closer to a moderate political line that preceded his Agra summit with President Pervez Musharraf.

Vajpayee curtly told the organizers of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s 50th anniversary meeting that his government was not getting the support from the party it expected and particularly targeted Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani for the more acid barbs.

“I have not missed the point,” Vajpayee said. “To start the meeting, to set the agenda Advaniji is called. You remember me when you have to call the meeting to a close. If you believe I have misunderstood your motive, then it’s perhaps even more serious. It shows a communication gap between my government and my party. This needs to be addressed urgently.”

Vajpayee and Advani are seen as representing the moderate and the Hindu rightwing flanks of the party that began its innings as Bharatiya Jana Sangh in the first 1952 elections.

Advani inaugurated the meeting with a call to the party to remember that its success was rooted in its plank of Hindu cultural revival. In a not too veiled statement he reminded the BJP that the Ram temple campaign was its life and soul which could not be negotiated. Hundreds of people were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots when Advani launched a march on Ayodhya in 1990 to replace a mosque there with a temple to the Hindu war-god Lord Rama

Information Minister Sushma Swaraj, widely regarded as an Advani protege, dismissed the remarks by Vajpayee as light-hearted banter.

Asked if Vajpayee’s plea to stem the rot in the party and his sarcastic remarks on Advani were a joke, she said the prime minister’s relations with Advani were old and strong. Swaraj’s appearance on television as a kind of a trouble-shooter brought memories of her similar performance in Agra, which many analysts saw as a key factor that led to Musharraf’s unhappy departure.

Vajpayee had privately expressed his unhappiness with his aides for the failure of the Agra summit. But he has maintained that no talks were possible with Pakistan if it continued to insist on talking only about Kashmir. Significantly there was no repeat comment from Vajpayee at the BJP meeting. Analysts said the notable lack of attention to Pakistan at a tempting hawkish platform could be a prelude to talks with Islamabad at some level.

From a party floated to protect the rights of Hindu minorities in Pakistan, to its present incarnation as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Bharatiya Jan Sangh has come a long way in the past 50 years.

The party was launched on Oct 21, 1951 by a handful of people drawn from the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), including Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, at a function at the Raghomal Arya Girls Higher Secondary school in Delhi.

Mukherjee, the Industries Minister in the first Cabinet of Jawahar Lal Nehru, had resigned to launch, at first, a regional party — the People’s Party — in Bengal.

The Jan Sangh, formed by Dr Mukherjee, was merged into the Janata Party in 1977, which emerged again in 1980 in its new incarnation — the BJP. Most of the Jan Sangh leaders took part in the Jai Prakash Narain-led students’ agitation in Bihar and were incarcerated during the Emergency.

The resolution that Advani moved and was adopted at Sunday’s meeting said:

“The Ayodhya movement became reflective of India’s cultural personality. It convinced people of the certain and sharp distinction between positive secularism and pseudo-secularism. Symbols of India’s cultural personality are not inconsistent with secularism. The movement created a massive national impact and changed the mindset of millions of Indians. Our acceptability grew. We spread into those areas of the country where we earlier had little presence.”

While the Ayodhya movement led to demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the party and its ideological partner, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, have brought the focus back on it in view of the forthcoming election in Uttar Pradesh. Their contention is that the movement is incomplete unless a grand temple is built at the disputed site.