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Statescan
Resentment
in the BJP ranks against the "discriminatory" attitude of the
BSP threatens an already tenuous coalition in Uttar Pradesh. A lowdown
by India Today's Subhash Mishra.
When
hundreds of BJP workers trooped into the residence of
former minister Vivek Singh in Banda and uprooted the party's flag from
there last week, it shouldn't have come as a surprise for the ruling BSP-BJP
alliance. Stary as the incident may seem, the growing resentment in the
BJP ranks against what they perceive as negligence in the hands of the
district administration has been evident for some time now. Even top leaders
of the BJP have, of late, been expressing their anguish: BJP Legislature
Party leader and former chief minister Rajnath Singh's unhappiness with
the reversal of his MBC quota policy, the new BJP president Vinay Katiyar
statement saying he would not tolerate the chief
minister humiliating his party workers, senior leader Baburam's warning
to Mayawati to mind her language and so on.
To be fair, the discord between the BJP and the BSP in the ruling coalition
was the chief minister's own doing. Addressing a meeting of BSP workers
soon after taking over, Mayawati stated that the alliance was a political
compulsion for the BJP and not the BSP. Substantiating her point, she
said that had the BJP not allied with the BSP, its strength would have
been reduced to half the number in the next assembly elections.
More than the import of her words, the BJP has been accusing the BSP of
being needlessly abusive. "The party does not have any established
ideology since its inception," says a senior BJP minitsre. "In
the name of bringing an end to the so-called Manuwadi system, BSP leaders
have been using venomous words against the upper castes and have thus
consolidated and organised the lower castes."
Used to the BSP's style of functioning, the BJP claims it would not have
reacted to the chief minister's remarks had they not been backed by actions
that were directly aimed at hurting the BJP's sentiments. To begin with,
Mayawati dropped two senior BJP leaders—Kalraj Mishra and Om Prakash
Singh—from the coordination committee. She also got the rock edicts
of former chief minister Rajnath Singh and then governor Surajbhan removed
from the Ambedkar Memorial Garden in Lucknow. Not just that, she went
ahead and reversed the MBC quota policy and ordered strict implementation
of the quota system in the postings of station house officers in police
stations and of officers of a particular caste in all key positions in
the districts as well as in the government.
Leaving none in doubt that she is the boss, the chief minister has
used every opportunity to address her constituency. While announcing her
new industrial policy in Lucknow, she said a Gautam Buddha airport would
be established in Kushinagar in the Buddhist circuit in addition to a
Rs 200-crore university with an exclusive Bahujan Samaj faculty. Fresh
instructions have also been issued to complete all development works in
the Ambedkar villages within two months. A draft is also being prepared
for an amendment in the Jamindari Abolition Act so that those belonging
to the Scheduled Castes would get ownership of gram samaj land even if
they were holding possession of the same land for a year. The BJP's demand
not to pursue her Dalit agenda has not made the slightest difference to
Mayawati. The latest subject of controversy between the two parties in
this matter has been the mass government recruitments. During the Rajnath
Singh regime, the recruitments were centralised at one level while Mayawati
wants to empower departmental heads for the purpose. The BJP, which feels
it would give room to corruption, had managed to get the proposal spiked
in the last cabinet. But now the issue has come to the fore again.
Protesting against Mayawati's new reservation policy, supporters of Rajnath
Singh staged a day-long dharna in Lucknow demanding that the MBC quota
policy be restored. Although Rajnath Singh, the architect of the MBC policy,
praised his protégé Satish Pal who led the agitation, the
BJP as a party has distanced itself from Pal's protests. This was in keeping
with the belief of a section, however miniscule, of the party that the
BSP-BJP feud should not be dragged to the streets. "The intention
of the both the BJP and BSP is very clear: to run the government for a
full five years. If there is any minor confusion, it should be ignored
in theis wider interest," says BJP minister Om Prakash Singh. Ram
Prakash Tripathi, another strong advocate of the alliance, who sees Mayawati
as a "bitiya", says in 1995, when the BJP allied with the BSP,
it was a "negative alliance aimed at dethroning the Mulayam Singh
government which had created anarchy in the state". The tie-up of
1997, according to him, was an experiment of the rotation system of the
chief minister. But this time, he believes, the coalition is on a positive
note and is aimed "saving the state from another election".
Intervening in the situation, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has
advised Mayawati to run the coalition government smoothly. The chief minister
insists that there is nothing amiss. When the issue of cabinet expansion
came up, Mayawati, she said it would take place only when the two parties
were finished with their organisational changes. Political observers feel
that she is only taking advantage of her rapport with some central leaders
of the BJP and that at the end of the day, she is doing just as she pleases.
Her decision to come out with a new policy for Muslims after the cabinet
expansion is yet another indication of that.
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