New Delhi, Feb. 23: Guess where the first fan mail for the government’s India Shining campaign has come from?

From Pakistan, in the form of an article penned by well-known Lahore columnist Masood Hasan in The News International, a daily.

BJP sources believe it is the best advertisement the National Democratic Alliance government could have got for its “feel-good” campaign. “The fact that India is shining and it is being acknowledged by the world and especially our neighbour, with whom we had a strained relationship in the past, gives us satisfaction and confidence that things have shaped up well,” said Ajay Singh, who is part of the data base cell headed by Pramod Mahajan, the BJP’s campaign in-charge.

The article, which stole a march over what Singh claimed were similar ones that appeared in US and Southeast Asian newspapers and magazines, will soon be put out on the BJP’s “Mission 2004” website conceived by Mahajan’s team.

Called Beyond the edge, the article, which appeared on December 14 last year, began on a whining note, suggesting how stagnant Pakistan is and how India has managed to turn around. The difference, as he quoted an Indian friend as saying, lay in the fact that while India looked to the stars from the gutter they were both in, Pakistan could not look beyond.

Hasan wrote of how India has marched ahead in the fields of information technology, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, not to speak of the so-called informal sector like diamond cutting and polishing and fashion. “These success stories are not propaganda and haven’t happened overnight or by good fortune. The Indians have the same bureaucracy and many of the politicians simply play politics, the infrastructure creaks and poverty abounds....”

But what makes India tick? “Cost and brain are two factors. Add to that, a determination to rise above what faces you everyday, a vision of the stars as the man said.”

Sources said Hasan’s article will be used as a “talking point” in the meetings the BJP will hold with “intellectuals and scholars” in the run-up to the polls.