Yatra puts Vaghela back in news

Vadodara, April 30: When it comes to staying the limelight, Rashtriya Janata Party chief Shankersinh Vaghela is an old hand. His current rat...

Vadodara, April 30: When it comes to staying the limelight, Rashtriya Janata Party chief Shankersinh Vaghela is an old hand. His current rathyatra across Gujarat, focusing ostensibly on the need for an early completion of the Narmada project, is also a surefire method of keeping the former Chief Minister in the news.

Again, the timing of the initiative cannot be faulted: summer has brought with it the usual scarcity of water — drinking and irrigational — especially in North Gujarat.

In Vadodara, the penultimate halt of the air-conditioned rath, on Thursday, Vaghela told Express Newsline that though the water issue was one of the gravest in the State, no government has been able to initiate a concrete or sustained solution. “The Narmada project can solve the water problem for 2 crore people and I will continue to fight for its early competion”, he said.

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After holding a rally at the Narmada dam site in Kevadia, Vaghela said he planned to form a high-level delegation and meet the president, the prime minister and the chief justice to press his demand. “If we fail, we will move court with a public interest litigation”, he added.

Sources said that Vaghela was, in fact, trying to rope in other politicians to back his demand for Narmada water. An independent councillor in the Vadodara Municipal Corporation joined the RJP formally today.

The RJP supremo said he planned to build up a major stir against the BJP government around the end of July-beginning of August — to coincide with his party’s foundation day — which will focus primarily on the water problem.

Addressing a Press conference earlier, Vaghela said that though a UNICEF charter, to which India was a signatory, held the right to drinking water as fundamental, the Narmada case had been gathering dust in the Supreme Court for years.

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The RJP would urge the Union government to set up an agency — apart from courts — to solve the water crisis as it affected the lives of lakhs of people, Vaghela said, adding that they also wanted a 300-km ditch-cum-canal dug along the Kutch-Pakistan border.

Later in the day, Vaghela left for public meetings in Bodeli, Naswadi and Tilakwada. He is scheduled to reach Kevadia colony in the night.

In the city, his yatra touched Fatehgunj, Nyaya Mandir, Mandvi and Chokhandi. Asked about the poor response to the yatra, Vaghela attributed it to the scorching sun.