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THE STATES: UTTAR PRADESH
Unsavoury Ministers
At a meeting at
the chief minister's residence, Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath got so angry
with Minister of State for Home Ranganath Mishra that he grabbed Mishra's
collar, accusing him of accepting Rs 80,000 to allow a "truck laden
with RDX" to cross over to Nepal. A Brahmin minister close to Mishra
ridicules the charge, "Adityanath is a fool. No one packs an entire
truck with RDX."
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RAJNATH AT WORK
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# Says he's providing a hands-on government, higher salaries for
teachers, a Tata-sponsored Taj Mahal package, better prices for
farmers.
# Rajnath's aides say he has arrested the departure of Rajputs
to the Samajwadi Party. Now wants to add the Jat vote.
# Wants to ignore "emotional issues" like Ayodhya and
focus on development and result-oriented administration.
# Says the BJP has done a lot of work in villages, will win "170-plus"
seats on its own.
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WHY IT DOESN'T WORK
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# State's bad record on rural development schemes persists. Sixty
per cent of funds for Swarna Jayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana unspent.
# Rajnath is accused of Thakurvaad, ignoring
OBCs.
# Without a mass issue, BJP workers are confused. Nor can they
praise a chief minister who has given tainted bureaucrats plum jobs.
# BJP got 33.6 per cent vote in 1996. In seven bypolls under Rajnath,
it averaged 21 per cent.
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Minister of State for Tax and Registration Amar
Mani Tripathi has been battling his principal secretary, T. George Joseph.
Bureaucrats say the minister forces them to send tax notices and conduct
raids-in one case on a relative of Power Minister Naresh Agarwal, with
whom Tripathi has a love-hate relationship in the Loktantrik Congress-unmindful
of legal niceties. In Ghaziabad, contraband worth Rs 40 lakh was seized
from a contractor whose visiting card introduced him as "Relative
of Amar Mani Tripathi". The minister claims the charge is farzee.
Aside from unsavoury ministers, Rajnath has
to tackle Uttar Pradesh's oldest problem, caste struggle. Perhaps no community
in the state has the sort of cross-party network the Rajputs do. While
the SP seemed to be drawing them a year ago, today the Rajput vote managers
have gravitated towards the chief minister. This has inevitably led to
charges of Thakurvaad. Recent massacres of Dalits by Thakurs in Aligarh
and Fatehpur, incidents Rajnath calls "a political conspiracy",
have not helped.
The Rajput thrust has upset the BJP's perennially
griping Brahmin brigade. State party chief Kalraj Mishra-nine of whose
senior lieutenants are Brahmin-is known to have his misgivings. The Brahmin-Thakur
rift, however, indicates a time warp mentality. The BJP's surge in Uttar
Pradesh in the 1990s came thanks to a shift in the non-Yadav OBC votes.
That the party was then led by Kalyan, a Lodh OBC, sent out politically
correct signals.
Now Kalyan is out of the party. The social engineering
of the 1990s has been replaced by, well, reverse engineering. Kurmi leader
Om Prakash Singh, who lost the race for both chief minister and party
head, is sulking despite three ministries. Other OBCs like Vinay Katiyar
are patently underutilised. The BJP's de-Mandalisation worries Tourism
Minister Ashok Yadav, "OBCs have to be seen to be represented properly
in the hierarchy."
Officially the BJP admits no more than "Kalyan
may cause the direct loss of 20-25 seats" in the Aligarh-Kannauj
belt. To offset this, Rajnath is pleading for an alliance with Ajit Singh's
Rashtriya Lok Dal, with its "huge presence in 90 constituencies in
the Jat region". Rajnath's rivals point out Ajit won only nine of
the 90 seats in 1996. In real terms, the BJP hopes the Jat-Rajput collective
will swing about 20 seats.
It is facile reasoning, one even its public
proponents are unsteady about. Already, the "mafia panchayats"
and rough and ready Rajput canvassing betray a certain nervousness. Surveying
his realm from Lucknow, Rajnath must feel like Napoleon-before Waterloo.
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