Uma’s Reality Bites

• The message from Gujarat is clear and it is a message for Madhya Pradesh and the whole country. Firstly, the politics of minorityism (alpsankhyakvaad) cannot work. There is a place for minorities in India but there is no place for minorityism.

—Uma Bharti at a public rally in Satna on December 26 when she took charge of the BJP election campaign in Madhya Pradesh.

THE two statements are separated by a span of nearly four months. They are also separated by two entirely different ways of looking at the election campaign in Madhya Pradesh. And despite BJP attempts to project it otherwise, the Sankalp Yatra virtually amounts to the relaunch of a campaign the party first kicked off in Satna.

In these four months, the BJP has travelled a great distance. It has left behind emotionally sensitive issues, the obsession in the aftermath of the Gujarat results, to harping on the anti-incumbency factor in the state. The change had much to do with the reality of Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress view of this is straightforward. According to Lalit Srivastav, Congress spokesman in the state, ‘‘The BJP drew the wrong lessons from Gujarat. Hindutva can never work in MP. They tried to exploit sentiments over two issues leading to the events of arson against Muslim property in Ganj Basoda and over the Bhojshala. The agitation over Ganj Basoda was a complete failure and Digvijay Singh has shrewdly settled the Bhojshala issue as well. They have seen by the reaction to Togadia’s arrest that Hindutva is not working so they have taken up development related issues.’’

Says a senior BJP state leader: ‘‘It is not as much a failure of Hindutva as it is a failure of not identifying the right issues.’’

The change in rhetoric is also due to the internal power equation in the Sangh. In December, when Uma took over the reins of the campaign, she met with opposition from the senior leadership of the party. The same day in Satna she held her public rally, also addressed a closed-door meeting of party workers where she began by invoking the relationship between Atal Behari Vajpayee and L K Advani at the centre comparing it to that of Ram and Bharat.

She expressed a hope that perhaps a similar equation could be worked out in the state between her and Kailash Joshi. She ended by saying that she was not a candidate for chief ministership. But she found herself isolated with virtually the entire top BJP leadership laying out their claims in private for the CM’s post nine months before an election which was nowhere near won.

Last June it was Advani who insisted that Uma take over the responsibility. It was the RSS which had ensured that the state leadership fell in line. At Bhopal last month, it was in Advani’s presence that Venkaiah Naidu reiterated the party’s backing for Uma Bharti in no uncertain terms, saying that the entire election campaign was her responsibility.

It was the RSS in the state which virtually oversaw this recent relaunch. But, it’s clear the opposition to her presence remains strong enough for the party to stop short of announcing her as CM candidate. This leaves the situation evenly balanced.

The BJP may be back on track, and while it is early days yet, anti-incumbency feelings run high in the state. The pathetic power situation is never far from discussion anytime anywhere in the state.

But the party has lost much in these four months–the fervour at Satna among the audience was far in excess of what was evident recently in Pandurna — without gaining anything substantial in return.