Political dot con

The two national parties are squabbling over a website name. Can there be a sillier mudfight?

What a healthy democracy we have! From the real world of Parliament to the virtual world of the internet, the two main parties of the country, the Congress and the BJP, are always testing their match-fighting skills against each other. And keeping us entertained in the process so that we don’t miss the action-packed sessions in Parliament. In the latest round of party vs party duels, the saffron party has accused the ruling party of virtual identity theft. The BJP has alleged that the Congress has created a domain name (www.bjp.com) similar to theirs (www.bjp.org). So if by mistake someone types bjp.com instead of the ‘correct one’, you will be directed to, er, the All India Congress Committee homepage. The Congress has denied any such hijacking project on its part and has said that the BJP is trying to “politicise a technological problem”. The defence sounded good until we editorial writers got into the thick of things and started reading the ‘plot’. Well, after much deliberation, we still fail to understand how a tech problem can lead a surfer to the Congress page alone, and not to the page of, say, the Zoram Nationalist Party (Mizoram) or the Bourgeois Jats Platform, that could have at least explained the ‘pirate’ domain name’s initials.

HT Image

But lest we forget, there’s our old friend, the ‘foreign hand’. The faux BJP website’s owner turns out to be one Bharat Journals and Publications based in America. However, when journalists dialled its number, it went unanswered. Is there any iota of doubt now that the ‘foreign hand’ is back? This time it’s not inflation, floods and train accidents that it’s responsible for, but creating strife between the real building blocks of this incredibly happy country: the political parties.

The BJP should not bother about such silly issues of identity theft. Instead, they should spend some sleepless nights about restoring its identity in the real world: the main national Opposition party. The rest, as they keep saying, will follow.