Inside Track: A fight for pride rather than ministerships in UP

The Bahujan Samaj Party-Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh has survived, at least for the present. The revolt by a group of BJP legislators led, surprisingly, by the veteran Ganga Bhakt Singh, has died down.

But not because the state BJP leadership was able to frighten them into submission by threatening the dissolution of the assembly or the imposition of president's rule.

If the BJP MLAs have fallen in line, it is because the party's national general secretary Rajnath Singh has succeeded in assuaging their hurt feelings, assuring them of their rightful place in the organisation.

The recent expansion of the Mayawati government was only the apparent cause of the mini revolt, but things were simmering in the BJP Legislature Party for quite sometime due to the arrogant ways of newly appointed UP BJP chief Vinay Katiyar and the shenanigans of Lalji Tandon, the heavyweight minister in the Mayawati government and leader of the BJP group in the state assembly.

Though Katiyar and Tandon do not generally see eye to eye, they were one in treating party legislators virtually as bonded labour. Their arrogant ways and their refusal to take along everyone in the party fuelled the revolt.

In particular it was Tandon's attitude coupled with his deserved reputation for sleaze which caused old party faithfuls like Ganga Bhakt Singh to rebel. The sole reason for Tandon's arrogance was his proximity to the prime minister.

He represents a Lucknow assembly segment which was part of the prime minister's parliamentary constituency and also acts as Vajpayee's poll manager. This has given him relatively greater access to Vajpayee than others and which he has been exploiting. Small wonder then that one of the major demands of the dissidents was to seek the removal of Tandon as the leader of the party in the state assembly.

Tandon had slighted senior leaders like Ganga Bhakt Singh. Singh was one of the four RSS 'pracharaks' who was assigned to work for the Jana Sangh, the BJP's earlier avatar, in Uttar Pradesh in the early fifties.

Instead of keeping him in good humour, the state BJP leadership pointedly ignored him, failing to consult him even perfunctorily in such matters as the constitution of the state government or the selection of the BJP component in the Mayawati ministry.

Singh and others told central emissaries that though they deserved to be ministers by dint of their seniority, they could live with being foot soldiers of the party but were not willing to be humiliated by the likes of Tandon and Katiyar.

Rent-a-crowd rallies are a regular feature of the Indian politics. Former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda held one recently in the national capital to put everyone on notice that he could not be ignored.

Despite their best efforts the organisers could not muster more than six, seven thousand people. While most of them dispersed as soon as various leaders had delivered their set-piece speeches, ranting against the ills of the ruling National Democratic Alliance coalition, a thousand-odd stayed back overnight and were hastily put up at an inn attached to a famous temple on the outskirts of South Delhi.

And from the word go, they began to behave raucously. When a few of these drunken louts stirred out of the inn, they teased women of the village abutting the temple.


How fortunes change! Virender Sehwag, the ace Indian batsman nicknamed 'chhota Sachin' comes from a lower middle class family which for long has lived in an urbanised village in West Delhi, Nazafgarh.

After playing for India for barely a year, Sehwag has become so rich that the family is already thinking of moving out of the house they have lived in for as long as he can recall. And why not? After all, he has notched up contracts for commercial sponsorship of over Rs80 million this year alone. And more such lucrative contracts are on the way.

At the rate he is scoring tons, 'Nazafgarh ka Sachin', as neighbours proudly call Sehwag, could well compete with his idol in endorsing pens, pencils, cokes and cars and other assorted goods and services which are marketed in the cricket-crazy country, especially for the younger generation.

Politicians use power to expand their base and to disburse patronage to their favourites, besides, of course, raking in the moolah. Now, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj may not be lining her pockets with unearned rupees, but she sure is using her stint to ensure that only those who toed her line or were suitably obliged to her appeared on the state-owned TV and radio.

A list of the minister's favourite scribes has the names of those who are to be invited for Doordarshan panel discussions, radio commentaries and so on.

One can have no quarrel with that too, for over the years successive I&B ministers have used Doordarshan and AIR to bestow favours on their camp followers in the media and other walks of life.

But what has shocked sections of the Sangh Parivar is the blatant misuse of the state-owned media, especially AIR, to propagate the opinion of those who are viscerally hostile to the ruling NDA, particularly the BJP.

A case in point is the discussion on FM channel of AIR on the evening of October 28, the ostensible topic being the Supreme Court opinion delivered earlier in the day on the presidential reference on Gujarat.

The journalist moderator and the Delhi University don vied with each other to damn the Sangh Parivar and both hoped that it would come to grief when the elections are held later this year in the state.

Now, it can be nobody's case that critics of the ruling party ought not to be heard on the state-owned radio. No, but a modicum of balance, a bit of fairness is expected from an institution which is funded by taxpayers' rupees.