Labourers repair a railway track which was uprooted by protesters at Gaghwal near Jammu on Tuesday. (Reuters)

New Delhi, Aug. 5: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to repeat Sonia Gandhi’s Jammu message to the BJP when he meets its leaders at an all-party meeting he has convened tomorrow.

Sonia had told BJP boss Rajnath Singh last Sunday that parties needed to be “mature” in handling the Amarnath issue and not allow its fallout to spin out of control.

But with the BJP backing what it has termed a “mass movement by the anguished people of Jammu”, Congress sources said the meeting would yield little beyond a ritualistic call to parties to “rise above politics and work to restore peace and order”.

The indication by the National Conference and the PDP that their priority was to look after their constituents in the Valley has added to the despondency .

The sources said Singh was likely to tell the BJP not to take “political advantage” of the situation and to ensure the return of normality so that the Centre could take measures to assuage feelings across the state.

He would tell them the first step would be to lift the economic blockade tacitly enforced by the Jammu agitators against the Valley.

The sources did not sound optimistic about a positive response from the BJP, especially after what L.K. Advani said on the sidelines of an official dinner hosted for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

According to BJP sources, Advani termed the protests “more than a mass political movement”. He said Jammu had not seen anything like this since the fifties when the Praja Parishad Movement, founded by erstwhile Jan Sangh leader Balraj Madhok, raised the slogan of “Jammu alag karo” (separate Jammu).

The sources said Advani and Arun Jaitley, likely to represent the BJP at tomorrow’s meeting, would re-state the points made by party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad.

“The role of political parties is minimal. People from all walks of life… are out on the streets with the Tricolour in their hands and ready to face even bullets for their cause,” Prasad claimed.

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said: “What happened in Jammu is happening in the Valley. If there is no movement between the two parts, you have succeeded in doing what the anti-national forces could not: bifurcate Jammu and Kashmir. You have scored the classical self-goal.”

Meeting at PMO

A meeting was held at the PMO, attended by IB director P.C. Haldar, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Saifuddin Soz. Home secretary Madhukar Gupta and special secretary, internal security, M.L. Kunawat, briefed Shivraj Patil on Gupta’s visit to Jammu.