Anna Hazares supporters in Chandigarh offer roses to a police officer in order to convince her to allow them to carry out their protest march against corruption towards the residence of Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Thursday. (Reuters)

New Delhi, Aug. 25: The BJP today rooted for Anna Hazare’s version of the Lokpal bill, two days after it had distanced itself from the draft, the somersault coming in a letter the party’s president wrote to the fasting activist.

“We have always been and are for a strong Lokpal,” Nitin Gadkari said in his missive. “For that to happen, (the) BJP accepts your Jan Lokpal bill to be the basis for a strong and effective Lokpal to be put in place at the earliest without getting into procedural wrangles.”

The letter was written and despatched this evening by Gadkari’s colleagues Jagat Nadda and Vinay Sahasthrabuddhe hours after Hazare associate Arvind Kejriwal had publicly challenged the BJP to spell out its stand on the Jan Lokpal bill.

Sources cited several reasons for Gadkari’s somersault.

They said he was pressured by the RSS and a section of the BJP to take a more strident stand on Hazare’s fast after leaders like Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha voiced concerns over the party yielding its political turf to “civil society” for “want of clarity” on the issue.

The Sangh and the BJP dissenters, the sources said, felt that the parliamentary strategists were going “soft” on the government.

A national executive member, close to the RSS, said he was “unhappy” with Lok Sabha Opposition leader Sushma Swaraj readily associating the BJP with the Prime Minister’s statement on the Hazare episode this morning.

He wondered why the usually combative Sushma “allowed” Manmohan Singh to get away with his dare to the BJP to nail him on personal corruption. “Nobody from our party suggested he was under a cloud. But as the UPA government’s watchman, he slept through the 2G, CWG and other big scams and this point was not made by Sushma,” he said.

It is learnt that when Hazare brought up the BJP’s “fuzziness” with Gadkari’s colleagues, he was told that Sushma’s brief address at the all-party meeting Singh had convened yesterday was in sync with the party’s stand of supporting the Jan Lokpal bill.

Gadkari’s letter said Sushma had demanded that the government withdraw its Lokpal bill and supplant it with a more powerful one.

To reinforce the message of “solidarity” with Hazare, Gadkari today floated a new outfit called the Yuva Vahini, which drew its cadres from the party’s youth wing.

The cadres not only replenished the crowd at Ramlila Maidan but also picketed the Prime Minister’s residence. Sources said the leaders had a hard time reining in the Vahini hotheads from raising the slogan “Yeh match-fixing nahi chalega (this match-fixing will not be brooked)”.

The aborted slogan was intended as a comment on the party’s failure to take on the UPA government on corruption and several other issues.

The sources said another reason behind Gadkari’s flip-flop was that he had repeatedly signalled in this session of Parliament that he would have a say in the party’s parliamentary functioning and not confine himself to organisational matters. His presence at a meeting of the parliamentary party emboldened the MPs to tell their leaders that they ought to be more “confrontationist” towards the government on corruption.

The sources, however, conceded that despite Gadkari’s backing for the Jan Lokpal bill, they had fewer differences with the government’s version and the proposals put forth by Aruna Roy of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information.

They said while there were three sticking points about the official draft — inclusion of the Prime Minister, higher judiciary and conduct of MPs inside Parliament in the Lokpal framework; selection process for the authority and the procedure to dismiss the ombudsman — they had more issues with Hazare’s. Aruna’s recommendations, on the other hand, were “almost identical” to that of the BJP and, by implication, more acceptable, the sources said.

“But this is something we can’t say openly because she is not sitting on the streets with lakhs of protesters,” said a leader.