People's Democracy

GUJARAT NEWSLETTER

Dissidents Push Modi To The Wall

Babulal Likhure

THE BJP’s mascot of militant Hindutva and the much touted ‘number one’ chief minister, Narendra Modi, is once again in trouble as the ranks of the party’s dissidents are growing by the day.

This was evident from the dissidents’ recent meeting right under the nose of Modi --- at a farm house in the state capital, Gandhinagar.

The already ongoing deliberations in social circles that the farm house owner would now face all sorts of harassments ---getting notices from civic, electricity, sewerage and water supply authorities for various acts of omission and commission ---- only proves what the dissidents have been saying for nearly three years : that Modi rules by harassments and vindictiveness.

Their allegations were never without reason as many establishments run by the dissidents or their close relatives have actually been raided in the past by state-administered authorities like the Gujarat Electricity Board (GEB) or the municipal corporations.

The dissidents’ description of Gujarat under Modi, famously termed by their leader and former chief minister Keshubhai Patel as ‘mini-Emergency’, has also been inadvertently admitted by the charge-sheet recently submitted by the state CID in the local court where the trial of the fake Sohrabuddin encounter case is to begin.

In its eagerness to bail out the BJP leaderships in Gujarat and Rajasthan of charges of ordering the encounter on behalf of the marble traders, the CID charge-sheet has reportedly stated that DIG Vanjara had staged the fake encounter just for seeking promotion and to get into the good books of Narendra Modi.

With such a view about the motive behind the encounter, this document, prepared by a wing of the Gujarat Police, willy-nilly concedes the existence of an ideological environment in which IPS officers feel the need to kill just to please their political masters.

It is not known whether the chief minister had uttered “Modi khush hua” after the encounter killing, but the die-hard BJP supporters do derive solace from the fact that the CID charge-sheet in the Vanjara case has let off the party bosses of any blame of having ordered an encounter killing so that the marble traders could be spared of the extortions by Sohrabuddin.

That the dissidents are venting their feelings against the chief minister’s ‘autocratic’ and ‘self-centred’ functioning is no news anymore ---- they had been doing it for the last few weeks. But what should alarm Modi now is that almost all the senior leaders of the dissident group have now come out openly against the chief minister.

Moreover, the rabble-rousing VHP general secretary Pravin Togadia too declared that his organisation’s support to the BJP need not be taken for granted in the forthcoming assembly elections in Gujarat.

Togadia’s announcement of VHP not supporting Modi in the elections came just a few days after the dissident group reportedly gained strength with more senior leaders joining the anti-Modi tirade.

In earlier years, Togadia’s prior pronouncements that the VHP would not be having any truck with the BJP during elections were taken with a pinch of salt and dismissed as mere intra-Sangh Parivar strategy of pretending to maintain a safe distance between the Hindu fundamentalist organisation and its political wing. But this time, in the changed political environment, Togadia’s threat to Modi this time appears real as he had already spit venom against the chief minister while speaking at Patel’s congregation at Surat in June this year.

Except the former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, Modi’s bete noire all the senior leaders of the dissident group like former chief minister Suresh Mehta, former union minister Kashiram Rana and Dr Valabh Kathiria, Dr A K Patel and Somabhai Patel, MP attended the meeting of the dissidents where a decision was taken to broaden the scope of their campaign against the chief minister.

The economically influential Patel community, of which the former chief minister Keshubhai Patel is considered the present patriarch, is already at loggerheads with the BJP ever since Modi had ousted him as part of their intra-party arrangement. On the other hand, numerically important Kolis, a backward community mainly constituting fishermen, are also aggrieved over Modi’s failure to apprehend the culprits behind the rape and murder of a girl in Junagadh in May this year.

The dissidents, meet, which state party seniors like Kashiram Rana, Suresh Mehta, Dr A K Patel and Dr Vallabh Kathiria, openly attended for the first time, has decided that their campaigns now onwards would encompass other communities also.

Enlarging the dissidents’ campaign beyond the already hurt Patel and Koli sentiments is bound to send shivers down Modi’s spine, as the other significant section of vote bank has been dented by the UPA’s legislation on the tribals’ land rights and also the arrest of the BJP’s tribal MP Babubhai Katara while on a human trafficking jaunt.

Modi’s two yatras planned later this month ----- ‘Sagar Khedu” in the coastal region and ‘Vanbadhu’ in the tribal areas ---- is thus aimed at salvaging the lost glory among the Koli and tribal communities respectively. It is beyond doubt that the government machinery would be grossly misused for the two ‘yatras’ that are essentially meant to boost the image of Narendra Modi.