Comment: Uma Bharti hopes to make political capital

Caught between a conspiring Party President and the prospect of facing the ignominy of being arrested as the Chief Minister, Uma Bharti has taken the safe option of submitting her resignation, hoping that she would be able to capitalise it politically on a national level with a "Tiranga" (tricolour) yatra (tour).

In fact her announcement on Saturday in Bhopal, came after she had steadfastly rejected all demands of resignation till Friday night, saying that she had not committed any crime, and she was proud of it as she had only upheld the pride of the tri-colour.

However all that bravado of Friday had evaporated on Saturday afternoon, when she announced her resignation, as she had realised that she was up against some people within her own party who would like to see her back. So instead of waiting to be asked to resign, today, when the BJP Parliamentary Board meets, or when the Court rejects her petition in Hubli, seeking quashing of the proceedings against her, she decided to offer her resignation.

In fact, it is learnt from reliable sources that she was apprehending her arrest when she was in Bangalore on August 16 itself, and had gone there reluctantly. She is learnt to have even then realised that her position will become untenable if she gets arrested, and therefore dilly-dallied before deciding to visit Bangalore to attend some programme. She is also said to have consulted senior party leader L.K. Advani and even Party President Venkaiah Naidu and had offered to resign before she went there.

But the idea was apparently rejected by Advani. The reason why she still went to Bangalore was hoping that she would be arrested and she could become a martyr in the cause of upholding the pride of the tri-colour. But when the Karnataka Government and the police ignored her presence and decided to wait for the Court orders, she was in fact disappointed.

Massacre site

However, now with the pressure growing on her, she realised that any further delay in her resignation would prove counter-productive and therefore she decided to go ahead, and even announced a "tiranga yatra" from Hubli's Idgah Maidan to Jallianwala Bagh, the venue of the massacre of hundreds of Indians by General Dyer in 1919.

She hopes to recreate the passion and patriotic fervour, which marked the Jallianwala Bagh meeting, which ended in the massacre. She has chalked out a programme which goes through some of the historic sites associated with the freedom movement, like the August Kranti Maidan in Bombay, where the quit India movement was launched in 1942.

However, the politics of the Madhya Pradesh BJP politics is likely to trail her too, as there is a significant section in the State, which has been very uncomfortable with her ever since she was selected to lead the party in the State and subsequently made the Chief Minister, after a resounding victory in December 2003.

Shivraj Singh, the Party's National General Secretary, who is known to be a Venkaiah Naidu acolyte, and is pitched against Uma Bharti in the State, is now being tipped to take over from her, if and when, her resignation is accepted by the party. This itself would mean that she would find herself not too welcome in the State, where she is considered as the party's best bet.

Meanwhile, her efforts to invoke the spirit of the freedom struggle, may come a cropper, as her starting point for the yatra, is no more a disputed place. The idgah maidan, where the flag hoisting controversy had led to her arrest, filing of cases against her and subsequent violence, communal riots and deaths, and also firing by the police killing six person, is no more barred from hoisting the flag. The issue does not evoke the kind of passions it did once, which had actually sustained the BJP in that region of Karnataka.

– Girish Nikam is an analyst on political affairs