Beggerly BJP Still Foraging For Congress Crumbs !
FROM
R.K.MISRA
If you can’t beat them, deplete them.
After over twenty years
of uninterrupted rule in its model state, Gujarat, the BJP is still
foraging
for rival’s crumbs to fill it’s overloaded basket. And so it was that on July
14,it inducted Mahendrasinh Vaghela
,former Congress legislator and son of the eternal rebel, Shankersinh
Vaghela into their party. Earlier on July 3,Kunvarji Bavalia a senior Congress
leader had switched to the BJP and was gifted a full- fledged cabinet ministership
in the Gujarat government the same day.
Mahendrasinh had been
elected to the Gujarat Assembly in 2012 on a Congress ticket from Bayad
constituency in Central Gujarat but had quit the party along with father
Shankersinh and 13 other legislators before the Rajya Sabha elections in which
Ahmed Patel won narrowly. Mahendrasinh was expected to join the BJP before the
2017 Gujarat Assembly elections. He neither did so nor contested the elections
though his father created a political outfit, Jan Vikalp Morcha which contested
105 seats and failed to win a single one in the 182 member House.
Incidentally ,Bavalia, a
four times MLA who was elected to the Lok Sabha from Rajkot in 2009 and was
inducted into the Gujarat government
right away had a running duel
with another Congress leader Indranil Rajyaguru who had announced his
resignation from the Congress days earlier. Both were unhappy that the Congress
national leadership was ignoring them.
The fact is that the creditable
showing of the Congress in the 2017
Gujarat Vidhan Sabha elections had made Rahul Gandhi realize that the party had accumulated a lot
of deadwood and needed a drastic overhaul. With almost the entire Congress
leadership decimated in the polls, the process began in earnest. A new state
unit chief(Amit Chavda) and a new leader of the Congress Opposition,(Paresh
Dhanani)-both in their forties-were inducted. This has ruffled elderly feathers
providing fertile ground for BJP poaching. ”It is collateral damage which we
are prepared for, to make the outfit
fighting fit for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections”, says a top party leader.
The grab and run game initiated by the ruling BJP owes it’s genesis to the impending
2019 Lok
Sabha elections and the mounting insecurity of the ruling outfit after
the opposition Congress
gave it a scare in the 2017 state Assembly elections. The BJP had bagged
all the 26 Lok Sabha
seats in the state in the 2014 general elections, a feat
they are in no position to repeat next year.
The poaching is aimed to
weaken the Congress more than improving
it’s own standing.
But this approach is
fraught with it’s own dangers. No sooner did Bavalia switch to the BJP that
Bhola Gohil, the former Congress MLA from Jasdan who had cross voted in favour
of the BJP in
the 2017 Rajya Sabha elections, re-joined the Congress. Earlier
this week former BJP MLA
turned AAP leader Kanu Kalsaria joined the Congress in
the presence of Rahul Gandhi in Delhi.
Kalsaria, a doctor- politician with a
clean image acquired a name for himself when he led a
successful agitation
against corporate giant Nirma which was allotted large chunks of wetland by
chief minister Narendra Modi in Gujarat for a project.
Another Congress leader to resign from the Congress was
Indranil Rajyaguru, who had contested
against the chief minister Vijay Rupani
from Rajkot and lost. Indranil though made it clear that he
would not join the
BJP . Bavalia’s departure will ensure Indranil
stays put.
Incidentally Bavalia’s last
kisan sammelan before he joined the BJP on June 24 had flopped.
This is
indicative that the party’s strategy to create an alternative koli community
power centre
may not work. It already has a koli face in the cabinet,
Purshottam Solanki who has been sulking
at not being given a prominent ministry
and the induction of Bavalia is meant to undercut him.
2017 Rajya Sabha elections in Gujarat when Amit Shah
conspired to defeat Congress leader Ahmed Patel, he had masterminded the
defection of 14 Congress legislators to
set the tone for the Assembly elections that were following. Eleven of these
joined the BJP, seven of them were given BJP tickets, five of them lost.
Similarly Bavalia was not the lone case.He was only following in the footsteps
of Balwant Rajput, the one- time chief whip of the Gujarat Congress who
defected to the BJP and was immediately offered a Rajya Sabha seat in a bid to defeat
Ahmed Patel. Rajput lost in a poll that hogged headlines and was subsequently
appeased with the chairmanship of a state undertaking. To sum it all, Shah’s
bravado backfired and in the Assembly polls that followed ,the Congress was a
net gainer of 21 seats in 2017 against the 57 it had won in 2012.
There is considerable resentment within the rank and file at this ‘parachute’
politics being practiced by the Modi-Shah combine at the cost of loyal cadres
but quietude remains the better part of
bravado as the two rule unchallenged.
Meanwhile, the plight of Congress leaders who left to join
the BJP is best typified by former Congress deputy chief minister Narhari Amin.
The man who once thundered in the Congress could not even manage a State
Assembly ticket for himself in the BJP in 2017 and was reduced to a door to door
campaigner for others .
For that matter ,the
BJP itself has come a long way from being a party with a difference to one
increasingly top driven and a receptacle for Congressmen- bent, bought or
bullied !
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