People's Democracy

Gujarat

EC Brake on BJP's Opportunistic Politics

Baburam Likhure

The state of Gandhi’s birth had recently been in the vortex of opportunistic politics over the last few weeks as it gears up for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.It began with the ruling BJP claiming all the credit for the permission recently given by the Narmada Control Authority (NCA) to raise the height of the Narmada dam to 110 metres subject to the rehabilitation of the people to be displaced by the submergence it would cause.

But the BJP and its arrogant chief minister Narendra Modi were stopped in their tracks by an alert Election Commission when it ordered the "Narmada Pujan Yatra" to halt some 70 kilometres from its destination at the dam site. Disregarding the Supreme Court as well as the Narmada Control Authority’s directives that no political party should try to take credit for the clearance of construction work up to 110 metres, the state BJP had organised a massive show at Ahmedabad before Modi embarked on a "Narmada Pujan Yatra" to the dam site at the tri-junction of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Such was the audacity of the ruling BJP members that they told the "Narmada Pujan" rally that all the hurdles to the Narmada dam project could be cleared now only because there are BJP governments in the other participating states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

It was a clear violation of the directive that no political party should claim credit for the clearance of the dam work which had in any case been going on for more than 30 years, though there were many roadblocks over the issue of rehabilitation of the poor tribal people who have been displaced by the irrigation-cum-power generation project.

As though fooling of the people by the ruling BJP on the Narmada issue was not enough, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Ms Mayawati too came down to test the waters in electoral arena of the state where Hindutva forces are ruling the roost for last several years.

Reiterating her ‘caste is class’ theory at a rally she addressed in Ahmedabad, Ms Mayawati however made one point that the Dalits and Muslims remain equally oppressed under the BJP rule in the state. Harping on her favourite topic of all parties being "Manuvadi" in their approach to the Dalits, Mayawati announced her decision to contest 18 of the 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state where the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) hasn’t won even an assembly seat ever.

Apart from the tongue-lashing aimed at the bourgeoisie parties like BJP and Congress, the BSP leader failed to offer class struggle as an alternative to the socio-political and economic oppression of the Dalits and Muslims who have been made to attack one another in the state during the post-Godhra riots in 2002.

Both being educationally and economically backward, the Dalits and Muslims in Gujarat had lived together for ages, sharing their poverty, ghettos and oppression. But such bonhomie between the Dalits and Muslims in the slums were systematically ruptured by the Sangh Parivar over the years by co-opting certain influential Dalits into the VHP fold who were later used against the Muslims during March-May 2002 riots.

The BSP leader did not touch upon these issues of the VHP-inspired rupture in the Dalit-Muslim unity that created havoc in the poor localities inhabited by these sections of the people. Ms Mayawati also did not talk of the Dalits’ realisation of they having being taken for a ride by the upper caste VHP elements during the riots.

There had been several instances of the Dalits being used by the VHP to attack Muslims, but the Hindutva organisation’s political clout was used only to bail out the upper caste activists. Such differential treatments to Dalits have led to an uprising culminating in thousands of them embracing Buddhism at a rally in Vadodara in October last year.

These issues of political significance did not seem important to Ms Mayawati who only went by the dictum of ‘caste is class’ while deciding to jump into the electoral fray in the heavily saffronised state that is Gujarat after the Sangh Parivar engineered the anti-minority riots of 2002.

Election fever is slowly catching on even as the scars of the genocide violence remain.