NEW DELHI, Feb 6: In an all too brief reversal of roles, the head of India’s main opposition BJP on Friday accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ruling coalition of creating war hysteria to win the arriving elections, United News of India said.

It said BJP president Rajnath Singh, kicking off a national executive meeting ahead of the polls, accused the head of the ruling Congress party Sonia Gandhi of seeking direct action against Pakistan for alleged encouragement to terror. “The use of bogey of war for political purposes is not good for the country,” the BJP president was quoted as saying.

BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said the war hype created by Ms Gandhi could not be compared with India’s operations in Kargil to push back Pakistani forces from the regions undertaken during the NDA regime, which was led by the BJP.

BJP’s new-found pacifism was short-lived, and having made its point about the war bogey it slid quickly into a more familiar pattern of hardline prescriptions.

Mr Singh cautioned the UPA government over the futility of having joint terror mechanism with Pakistan. “The biggest blunder by the government was to agree to form an Indo-Pak joint anti-terror mechanism.” Under this mechanism, there is an arrangement that India and Pakistan will share terror related information and evidence with each other. “Taking advantage of this, on the basis of media reports, Pakistan has demanded the handing over of the Malegaon accused Lt-Col S. Purohit in the Samjhauta Express incident,” Mr Singh said.

During its tenure, the UPA government had committed not one but four strategic and diplomatic blunders with respect to Pakistan, Mr Rajnath Singh said.

“On January 6, 2004, at the time of Vajpayee government, Pakistan had in a joint statement committed that it would not allow its land to be used for anti-India terror activities. However, in 2005, in the joint statement that was released, there was not even a mention about Pakistan’s this commitment,” he said.

“In 2006, at the Non-Aligned Summit in Havana, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by declaring Pakistan a victim of terrorism, gave it an escape route to defend itself.“The joint statement released by India and Pakistan stated that terror incidents would not be allowed to become an impediment in the path of the peace talks. As a result of this, the opportunity for creating diplomatic pressure in the wake of terrorist attacks has been lost,” the BJP leader told partymen.

“It pains me as I am forced to say that the steps which the Indian government has taken after the Mumbai attack, further actions will have to be taken far beyond them,” he said.

“As part of such steps, India should dissociate itself from the joint terror mechanism which was declared on 16th September 2006 in Havana, Cuba’s capital, by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the then president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf.”