On Friday afternoon, after visiting the families of some Gujarat floods victims, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi prepared to address a public rally in Dhanera, a town in north Gujarat’s Banaskantha district.
Dhanera’s legislator, Joitabhai Patel, is one of the 40-odd Congress MLAs in Gujarat who were whisked away to a resort in Bangalore on July 27, by an insecure party leadership afraid of them being poached by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the run-up to the Rajya Sabha elections later this month. The continued absence of the MLAs in the aftermath of a deluge that has killed at least 224 people in Gujarat has left people in their constituencies upset. Congress leaders seemed acutely aware of this as they introduced Gandhi at the Dhanera rally.
“Before Rahul Gandhi came to the mic, another party leader tried to evoke people’s emotions by saying that the big leader had come all the way from Delhi to meet them since their local MLAs could not be there,” said Harisinh Rajput, a 23-year-old hospital administrator who attended the rally on Friday. “People didn’t really react much to all that, and eventually Gandhi spoke for just two or three minutes before leaving.”
During his short speech, Gandhi was interrupted by protesters waving black flags at him. On his way out of Dhanera, his car was attacked by unidentified stone pelters who broke one of the rear window panes. Congress leaders have alleged that BJP sympathisers were behind the attack. The state government has ordered an enquiry into the incident.
The failure of Gandhi’s rally in flood-hit Dhanera is symbolic of the widespread disgruntlement against the party in a region where Congress is currently in the majority. Even though the BJP enjoys the majority in the Gujarat Assembly elected in 2012, Banaskantha district had elected Congress MLAs in six out of its nine constituencies.
According to Harisinh Rajput and other Banaskantha residents, the success of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 national election had already titled voter perception in favour of the Hindutva party to some extent. But the disappearance of Congress MLAs after the unprecedented floods of July 23-25 has further cemented the anti-incumbency they could face in the upcoming Gujarat Assembly election scheduled this November.
‘Congress ditched us’
“In the last election, we made the Congress win with a margin of 30,000 votes,” said Bhurabhai Patel, a farmer from Dhanera taluka’s Bhatib village who lost 20 acres of groundnuts and pomegranate worth nearly Rs 30 lakh during the flood. “But right now when we really needed him, our MLA ditched us. The entire Congress party ditched us.”
Officially, Gujarat’s disaster management plan envisages a limited role for elected MLAs. When a disaster strikes without early warning, information flows from the Taluka Emergency Operation Centres upwards to the district and state levels. The State Emergency Operation Centre informs the governor, chief minister, cabinet of ministers and the elected MPs and MLAs of the affected district. There is no formal provision for the MLAs to report to the state government.
But, on the ground, people expect elected representatives to play a role in disaster relief. “It is our MLA’s duty to represent our needs to the government – he should have been the one surveying our losses,” said Patel. “This is definitely the end of the Congress in Banaskantha.”
In Kankrej taluka, represented by Congress MLA Dharshibhai Khanpura, farmer Umedbhai Parmar is equally disillusioned. “As Dalits, we have always supported the Congress, because we know that the BJP is not a party for the poor and the lower castes,” said Parmar, who lost crop on six acres of his farms in Runi village. “But if our MLA has run away to Karnataka when we are in so much pain, how can you expect us to vote for the Congress again?”
The BJP constituencies
The political discontent of villagers in Banaskantha’s Congress constituencies stands out in sharp contrast to the relative satisfaction of villagers in BJP constituencies like Deodar taluka.
The scene in Deodar’s Chagwada village is not very different from other flood-hit villages in Kankrej and Dhanera. After being submerged in seven feet of water for two days, Chagwada’s farms are covered with sticky sludge and dead cattle, and people are still struggling to clean out debris from their battered homes.
Jagdishbhai Patel, a farmer who lost his cotton crop and bajra grains worth Rs 21 lakh, admits that Chagwada villagers have not received the government cash doles that worse-affected villagers in Dhanera and Kankrej were given for ration last week. “But our MLA, Keshaji Chauhan, came to meet all of us in many villages, along with other BJP leaders. They are conducting surveys of our losses and have assured us that we will be compensated soon,” said Jagdishbhai Patel.
Savjibhai Chaudhri, another farmer from Deodar, claims that the taluka’s MLA arrived in the villages just two hours after the Narmada canal breach caused sudden flooding. “It was the MLA and other leaders who went around assessing which villages needed help, and then called the NDRF teams to those spots,” said Chaudhri. “I have heard from my friends in Congress talukas that BJP leaders visited them too.”
The BJP leaders appear to have sensed the political opportunity presented by the absence of the Congress MLAs. In the week since the floods, Bhurabhai Patel of Bhatib village said that everyone from the Chief Minister Vijay Rupani to other senior BJP leaders have paid a visit to his village and assured villagers of assistance.
In Dhanera, the state government has announced that it will conduct Banaskantha’s official Independence Day celebrations in the town this year, instead of marking the occasion at the district headquarters in Palanpur. “The BJP has promised to completely clean up the flood debris from the town before August 15, in time for the celebrations,” said Rajput.
“Clearly the BJP is playing politics, but it is working,” he added.