Gujarat Elections : Raining Inaugurations & Drizzling Agitations

 

BY R.K.MISRA

It is raining agitations and drizzling inaugurations in Gujarat as captains  and claimants fight over ‘facts’ and strip each other’s foibles to mutual nakedness. 

Poll time weighs heavy and the Bhupendra Patel led BJP government is sweating streams, as employees and allies alike, flash the sword in the quest for their pound of flesh.

If all manner of government employee organisations are on the warpath in support of their demands at one end , the filial Bhartiya Kisan Sangh has raised its fists threatening a fiercer stir at the other. Sandwiched in between are enraged ex-servicemen, firm road transport employees,  angry ASHA workers, fiesty forest guards, besides a host of meeker trade and professional bodies some submissively seeking alms and others attention.  A harassed  government finds itself deluged under a torrent of demands, all laced with deadlines and threats.  The hurried constitution of a five-minister panel to diffuse the situation and ensure that stirs do not go out of hand is simply overloaded to exhaustion.

The agitation-bound are in a hurry and so is the Patel government as the 9- member delegation led by senior deputy election commissioner Dharmendra Sharma of the Central Election Commission(CEC) completed a two day visit of Gujarat beginning September 18 with back to back review meetings with district collectors and police chiefs.

This has a direct bearing on the frenzy of the agitation-bound as well the urgency of the government. Through experience honed over decades, employees as well as sectoral interests have come to realise that the only time  governments are amenable to their demands is when elections are around the corner. This is more so after the advent of Narendra Modi as chief minister and later Prime Minister. The most cited example is that of the protracted  farmers stir in which over 700 of them lost their lives but the government relented only for fear of adverse impact in the UP polls. It was back to riding roughshod thereafter.

With the Arvind Kejriwal- led Aam Admi Party(AAP) making a determined foray in the state and the Congress opposition trying hard to hold on to its 2017 best of 77 seats in a 182 member state Assembly as against the BJP’s  Modi-time low of 99 seats , the state has become fertile ground for government employees  as well as sectoral spearheads to press aggressively in support of their wage and working condition demands. The Congress and AAP support to these stirs have only added oil to troubled waters and a besieged BJP has been put in a position wherein it is forced to concede. Take the case of the cops agitating for over an year for their grade-pay revision. Initially the government stone-walled holding that they were being paid as per the seventh pay commission recommendations  but as the stir turned serious it initially filed  10 FIRs against  27 accused  including police personnel and others  and even launched a probe against 229 policemen and subsequently appointed a 5-member committee to go into the demands of the cops. On August 10,Kejriwal promised the best pay scales for the police if AAP comes to power in the state. Four days later  the government announced a Rs 550 crores package of allowances. However an official insistence in writing  that the cops will not raise further financial demands saw them refusing to give an undertaking. A storm on the social media had the government capitulate and drop the undertaking. No sooner were these fires put out that another agreement with the talati-cum-matris(patwaris) is on the verge of coming undone. The patwaris are  the crucial implementors of the government’s rural development schemes at the grassroot level. Their state-level organization had for long been representing  for revision of allowances due for over a decade. At the end of protracted negotiations ,it was agreed to revise these allowances from Rs 900 to Rs 3000 beginning September 2022.However the insistence on an affidavit  turned the issue contentious.

There was cause for AAP  to take credit when the organisations spearheading the agitation of it 9 lakh employees called it off following an agreement  hammered out with the Group of 5 ministers. The government had agreed to pay the 7th pay commission arrears and bring all those who had joined before April 2005 under the old pension scheme as well as the Government Provident fund(GPF). AAP had only recently announced support to the agitation. The agreement , however split the employees with the post-2005 recruited determined to continue the fight as did the state health workers. Though the umbrella organisations had called off the stir, thousands of employees including school teachers joined the mass casual leave and protest march next day.

Meanwhile the continuing ex-servicemen’s stir took its first toll when one of its protesting members died. With the state capital Gandhinagar turned into a virtual police camp, the ex-servicemen are on a dharna in support of their 14- point demand though the government had conceded it’s demand for increased compensation for the next of kin of soldiers killed in the line of duty. The Congress and AAP have  promised to accept all their demands if voted to power.

Earlier  the Par-Tapi-Narmada river linking project announced in the union budget was scrapped days after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s announcement at a rally in tribal dominated Dahod district in May that the project would be junked if the Congress came to power in the state. Chief minister Patel who had earlier put the project on hold said it was being scrapped after the Congress spearheaded tribal stir began gaining momentum.

Despite the ministerial panel, the RSS founded  Bhartiya kisan Sangh has been agitating in the state capital of Gandhinagar since August 25 in support of their demand  that includes, among others, issues concerning agricultural power to farmers.  Criticising the  government’s delay in negotiating with the farmers, BKS has threatened to boycott ministers in  the rural landscape.  Kejriwal recently upped the ante when he made  five big poll promises for farmers which included 12 hour power supply, procurement at Minimum Support prices(MSP), Narmada water to every farmer in command area of the project as well as farm loan waiver.

Prime Minister Modi may have aimed at neutralizing anti-incumbency and the covid-time failures when he sent the entire Vijay Rupani cabinet packing  but  he inadvertently weakened the position of the outgoing as well as the incoming chief minister Bhupendrabhai Patel. With Modi and home minister Shah looming large in the state, the politically light weight replacement ,Bhupendra Patel helming a new cabinet  and a former cop for a state BJP party president, C.R. Patil, the government is hemmed -in with little manoeuvring space at its disposal. The sudden divestment of two key cabinet ministers Rajendra Trivedi and Purnesh Modi of the portfolios of Revenue and Road and Buildings respectively on August 20 on directions from Delhi is a case in point as it had an element of surprise even for the chief minister.

While the state administrative machinery is at pains dealing with the demonstratedly defiant streak of its own, union ministers and bureaucrats of all shapes and sizes keep flitting in and out of the election bound state reviewing one or the other project, making outlandish assertions  Examples abound .A sample. Sept.12:Union minister for ports, shipping and waterways Sarbananda Sonowal said the Gujarat govt was planning to double the capacity of its lone ship breaking yard at Alang to 10 million metric tonnes per annum(MMTA).This when 50 per cent of its present 4.5 MMTA capacity is lying idle.Sept.13:Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnav review progress of bullet train work in Ahmedabad, announces PM will flag off Vande Bharat express between Gandhinagar-Mumbai on Sept.30. Sept 13,Home Minister Amit Shah virtually inaugurates and lays foundation stone for various projects worth Rs 1200 crores from Gandhinagar.Sept 14: Shah takes part in All India Official Language Conference on Hindi diwas at Surat. According to a conservative estimate, the Prime Minister has himself laid the foundation stone or inaugurated projects worth over Rs 80,000 crores during his frequent visits to Gujarat this year. And there are many more high profile events lined up for the coming days as well. Poll time is splash time.

https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/in-gujarat-the-bjp-govt-faces-a-surge-of-protests-1146604.html