New Delhi, Aug. 7: Laloo Prasad Yadav, Shibu Soren and other “tainted” Union ministers can breathe easy for the BJP intends to focus instead on the price rise when Parliament reconvenes on August 16.

The BJP may not bring the House to a standstill as it did in the first half of the budget session when some United Progressive Alliance ministers fell within its firing range, but it is sure to train its firepower on what its party spokesperson termed a “more burning issue”.

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said his party will demand a discussion on the price rise and will try to make not just the government but its allies like the Left, Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party squirm.

The BJP is keen to see how the Left and Laloo Prasad fend off criticism. “If the Congress claims to be with the aam admi these parties profess to be the champions of the oppressed. Are they going to further oppress the oppressed by their failure to do something about price rise?” asked a source.

Naqvi said the BJP will launch a countrywide agitation focusing on poll-bound Maharashtra and Bihar, both of which are ruled by the Congress and its allies. It intends to rally the people with the slogan “Jab jab Congress desh mein aayee, kamar tod mehengai layee (Congress rule means crippling price hikes)”

Sources said the BJP would turn the Congress poll slogan of being a party of the “aam admi” on its head. Speaking to the media yesterday, party chief M. Venkaiah Naidu said: “Now the aam admi has started realising the ill-effects of high taxation in the post-liberalisation budgets. So far the government tried to sugarcoat the bitter pills it administered to the common man. The situation threatens to go out of hand despite the fact that we have an economist as the Prime Minister, another economist as the finance minister, a third one heading the Planning Commission and a bunch of super economists — the Left parties — giving momentum to the government.”

The BJP will try to parody the “aam admi” slogan much like the Congress ridiculed its “India Shining” and “feel good” phrases during the Lok Sabha elections — the latter juxtaposed pictures of the poor and deprived with the BJP slogans.

But rising prices are not the only item on the BJP plate. The party has accused the UPA government of creating an atmosphere reminiscent of the “permit quota raj” of the sixties and seventies so that “blackmarketers prosper by ensuring that even wheat and rice are out of the reach of the aam admi”.