The Bhartiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh will move firmly ahead on its dalit agenda and BSP president Mayawati will be its main target.
The Bhartiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh will move firmly ahead on its dalit agenda and BSP president Mayawati will be its main target. Upper castes, who have been the mainstay of BJP’s politics, have been surprisingly ignored. A majority of the leaders who attended the one-day state executive meeting of the party here on Friday believe the Samajwadi government will crumble under the burden of the anti-incumbency factor and the party should focus on dalits instead. “Deshbhakti” or nationalism will be another major agenda of the party which will be covertly used to highlight the anti-Indian character of the minority community — especially in the wake of the fatwa against “Bharat Mata ki Jai”.
BJP vice-president Om Mathur said the achievements of the Modi government should be clubbed with the issue of deshbhakti in the campaign. “The Modi government is a dhoti-gamcha ki sarkar — of the poor and for the poor,” he said.
According to UP BJP president Laxmikant Bajpai, the BSP claims to be a custodian of dalits but while BSP leader Naseemuddin Siddiqui gave financial assistance of '11 lakh to the family of the Dadri lynching victim, the party did not even bother to visit the families of Gaurav Khatik and Arun Mahaur (both dalits).
“This shows the apathy of the BSP towards dalits,” he told this correspondent on Saturday.
However section of party leaders, some of them seen snoozing during the deliberations, are upset at this sudden pro-dalit stance of the party.
“After a while, we felt we were attending a BSP meeting so we took a nap. The BJP has always been a broad based party but instead of talking about ideology and focusing on development, we spent the entire day talking about dalit politics in UP,” said a party leader.
BJP MLAs also feel this “dalitisation” of the party could boomerang in the Assembly elections.
“Our leaders are forgetting that upper castes, mainly Brahmins, and traders have led us to victory and this more-than-necessary focus on dalits could upset party equations. The traders are already angry with our policies and no efforts are being made to placate them,” he pointed out.
Interestingly, jewellers from the state capital, who have been agitating since the pats one month against excise on precious metals, lay down on the road at the meeting venue when Union ministers were about to leave. They carried placards with slogans that said ‘Kamal ka phool, banega dhool ka phool’ and ‘Hamari bhool, kamal ka phool’.
