BJP played Nero till protest became caste war

NEW DELHI: If the situation in Rajasthan spins out of control, culminating in a full-scale caste war, a bumbling state administration and a clueless party leadership would have contributed to it in no small measure.

While the state administration lay completely paralysed in the first couple of days after reports of Gurjar unrest started filtering in, the BJP leadership at the Centre did not help matters either. Despite receiving several complaints against the Vasundhara Raje government’s abrasive style of functioning and disconnect with the party cadre, the bosses at Ashoka Road continued to look the other way, allowing the situation to drift.

And after the clashes between the Gurjars and the Rajasthan police erupted, BJP president Rajnath Singh, in an effort to prove that he was clued in and on the job, held a stage-managed tamasha, meeting representatives of a string of Gurjar outfits who had no association with the main protagonists at Ground Zero. In either case, after muddying things up by a series of politically opportunistic moves, which were bound to have a catastrophic effect on the state’s social fabric, there is very little that the BJP leadership can do.

In an attempt to endear herself and her party to the Gurjars, who comprise some 5% of the electorate in the state but had traditionally been loyal to the Congress, Ms Vasundhara Raje promised them something which was difficult to carry out on the ground. Her task was made doubly difficult by the fact that the Gurjars were not a homogeneous group and could, in fact, be stratified in terms of religion, occupational background and socio-economic status. Historically too they were always considered a heterogeneous grouping. The Gurjar-Pratihara rulers of north India had nothing in common with the Gurjar and Bakarwal nomads of Jammu and the Kashmir valley, whose religious identity too was different.

Ever since the Vajpayee government conferred the OBC tag on the Jats, the Gurjars had been getting restive over the shrinking level of job opportunities in the government. The Jats, it was seen, were walking away with a large slice of jobs made available under the OBC quota. As job opportunities thinned down, the Gurjars were getting restless. They came up with a formula which, if carried out to its logical conclusion, was bound to invite the wrath of the Meenas, numerically and politically more powerful than the Gurjars.

Despite being forewarned about the simmering tension among the two communities, Ms Vasundhara Raje remained indifferent —an attitude which remained on full display even after the Gurjars took to the streets in support of their demand. It was only on Saturday, after clashes between the Gurjars and Meenas claimed the lives of at least four people, that the chief minister was jolted out of her slumber and forced to engage the Gurjar leaders directly.

If the state administration has been found wanting, the Manmohan Singh government at the Centre too has come out with knee-jerk reactions, despite being fully aware that it’ll have to take the final call on the subject. That is the only saving grace for the saffron leadership.