Why is Amit Shah talking about Rohingya Muslims and Kashmir in Gujarat - what happened to 'vikas'?
It is worrying to listen to our netas attempting to reach out to their electorate in the run-up to the Gujarat Assembly elections. With about a fortnight to go for the first phase of polling on December 9 for Gujarat Assembly, rhetoric has emerged as the only tool to convince the reluctant voter.
Sample this: BJP's national president Amit Shah kicked off the party's campaign tone at a high-voltage public rally in Bhavnagar on Tuesday.
He started with asking the audience (most were BJP workers by their own admission) whether they get sufficient water and electricity. He got a positive response from the crowd. He then moved on to talk about Rohingya Muslims, Congress leader P Chidambaram's statement about autonomy to Kashmir and surgical strikes in response to Pakistan's attacks. He again posed some leading questions before the crowd. And guess what, there was pin-drop silence. I say this again, by their own admission, they were BJP workers. Shah prompted again, and received a tepid response.
Shah was either testing waters on what kind of reception do these "soft communal issues" get, or he was setting the tone for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other leaders to follow as they descend on Gujarat in the coming weeks. But the fact is that his narrative was not centered around development. Few people have had the patience to listen to Shah's full speech. The national media does not find it pertinent to report the nuances. What gets said in such speeches is mostly left for the consumption of local voters.
For a perspective from the other side, let's go back in time. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi visited 20 temples in 12 days during his four-phase Navsarjan Yatra of Saurashtra, central, north and south Gujarat. These temples range from Ambaji to Dwarka to at least two Dalit temples and a temple of every other faith with a smaller number of followers that came along the way in his campaign trail. In fact, observers started joking if his yatra was planned to facilitate his temple runs.
In his speeches, Rahul waxed eloquent about how demonetisation and GST have failed and impacted small- and medium-scale industries and traders. How youths are unemployed. He made a mention of how farmers are losing their land to industrialists such as Tatas for their Nano plant. He drew attention to how an advance of Rs 33,000 crore was given by the state government to set up the car plant. "Gabbar Singh Tax" made very good headlines indeed.
All of this is very good rhetoric, but doesn't touch upon the real issues. The real issues that include water crisis, agrarian distress and a lack of jobs, remain untouched.
The water crisis is acute in most urban and rural areas of Gujarat. In Bhavnagar city itself, the corporation gives water only on alternate days. Rajkot city, chief minister Vijay Rupani's constituency, too suffers from water shortage.
Private water tankers charge through the roof for this basic necessity. Tankers, which are an expensive option, are only available in urban and semi-urban areas. Be it Sujalam Sufalam Yojana, or Narendra Modi's pet SAUNI (Saurashtra Avtaran Narmada Irrigation) Yojana, much is still stuck in the pipeline - literally. Under the SAUNI Yojana, pipelines will draw water from Narmada canals, and fill 115 dams of Saurashtra. This peninsula is essentially a semi-arid water-starved zone that has been heavily banking on Narmada waters for irrigation and drinking.
The other issue that really bothers Gujarat's farmers is the failure of Bt cotton crops all across the state. About 99.9 per cent of the state's cotton farmlands plant Bt cotton. Since the last two years, the crop failure has increased substantially. At the same time, the minimum support price (MSP) of cotton has, in fact, reduced from over Rs 1,000 to Rs 850. Illegal cultivation of Bt cotton thrived right under the nose of both the NDA and the UPA governments starting in 2001. Gujarat is looking at an agrarian crisis, but neither party is talking about it. Cost of fertilisers, pesticides, water, diesel in absence of electricity and even the global depression leading to falling demand are real issues.
At a recent presser in Ahmedabad, Union defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman spoke about how Rahul Gandhi, who was incidentally in Gujarat the same day, could not handle a little statue of Sardar Patel handed over to him on-stage. She mockingly asked how the Gandhi scion would be able to handle a government if he is not able to handle a small statue. The defence minister then went on with the rhetoric of how the Congress has always hated Patel. Later in the presser, some journalists asked her some pointed questions regarding the defence ministry, but she insisted she will only answer questions about Gujarat. When asked what the BJP's plans for Gujarat are, she said the manifesto will answer that.
Both the BJP and the Congress allege that the other party is diluting the agenda of "vikas" by attacking each other. They say this in the same sentence they mount personal attacks on leaders of the other party. If it wasn't so detrimental to the future of our country, this would be goddamn hilarious.