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Why BJP may not be able to wash off the stench and stains of MP’s PeeGate
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Why BJP may not be able to wash off the stench and stains of MP’s PeeGate

Puneet Nicholas Yadav
12 July 2023 12:30 PM IST  (Updated:2023-07-13 06:06:53)

Atrocities against tribals – or Dalits, for that matter, aren’t new in Madhya Pradesh. For years, the central Indian state, with a nearly 22 per cent tribal population, has retained the dubious distinction of registering the highest number of crimes against its indigenous population. The last published ‘Crime in India’ report for the year 2021, compiled by the National Crime...

Atrocities against tribals – or Dalits, for that matter, aren’t new in Madhya Pradesh. For years, the central Indian state, with a nearly 22 per cent tribal population, has retained the dubious distinction of registering the highest number of crimes against its indigenous population. The last published ‘Crime in India’ report for the year 2021, compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), shows that of a total of 8,802 cases of crimes against tribals registered across India, 2,627 cases (nearly 30 per cent) were from MP alone.

Yet, MP’s tribal population hasn’t seen any sympathy and solidarity coming from their government nor known of orders for a crackdown by the police administration against perpetrators of such atrocities, many of them repeat offenders, as records have often shown. It is, perhaps, for this reason that chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s dramatic outreach to Dashmat Rawat, a Kol tribal and resident of Kubri village in Sidhi district of the state’s economically-backward Vindhyachal region, stands out as a peculiar exception to the BJP government’s otherwise cavalier apathy towards instances of crimes against adivasis.

Rawat hit national headlines last week after a video of a man urinating on him went viral on social media. The outrage on social media spiralled into fervid fury when it was revealed that the revolting act was performed by Parvesh Shukla, ‘vidhayak pratinidhi’ (MLA representative) of three-term BJP legislator from Sidhi constituency, Kedarnath Shukla, while the victim was a tribal. What followed is a lugubrious tragedy of the opportunistic political exploitation by the state’s ruling BJP as well as the principal Opposition party, the Congress, of an abhorrent incident.

This being an election year in MP, the widespread indignation triggered by the video was promptly marshalled by the Congress to highlight the plight of tribals under BJP rule. Parvesh Shukla was arrested and slapped with stringent provisions of the National Security Act as well as the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. However, a video of Shukla haughtily walking to a police vehicle with some constables trudging behind him made matters worse for the BJP government.

A face-saving exercise was clearly needed for the ruling BJP and so Chouhan sprung into action. In a well-staged act of profuse atonement that was live-streamed from the CM’s residence in Bhopal by the government’s publicity machinery, Chouhan ushered Rawat into his home, washed his feet, offered him lunch, compared him to the mythical Sudama (Lord Krishna’s poor childhood friend in the Bhagwat Purana) and offered him all possible help, including money and a new house.

Meanwhile, a bulldozer, the new symbol of justice in new India, demolished part of Shukla’s home in Sidhi while his parents begged the civic administration to stop. Simultaneously, Shukla was made to undertake another perp walk by the police where, unlike the first one, he was pushed and shoved by constables while one constable repeatedly slapped him on the back of his head and neck.

The BJP may have hoped that all of this would undo some of the damage that the incident had caused to its image ahead of the assembly elections due in November this year. After all, 47 of the state’s 230 assembly seats are reserved Scheduled Tribes while their concentration in another 35 odd constituencies is crucial for any candidate’s victory. Moreover, Rawat belongs to the Kol tribe, which is the third-largest tribal community in the state after the Bhils and Gonds.

But then, this appalling saga had, by now, begun to look disturbingly similar to the fate that befell Natha, the lead protagonist in the critically acclaimed 2010 Aamir Khan production, Peepli Live, that was incidentally shot in MP. While Chouhan was busy hosting Rawat, a team of Congress workers, led by state Youth Congress chief Vikrant Bhuria, son of the party’s most prominent tribal leader and former Union minister Kantilal Bhuria, arrived in Kubri village to express solidarity with Rawat’s wife, Asha. The media made a beeline to Rawat’s house too.

In a video, Asha can be seen telling Bhuria that her husband was “picked up” by the local administration and she was unaware of his whereabouts until that morning when she was told that Rawat was in Bhopal to meet the CM. A while later, Asha is seen speaking to Chouhan on a phone with its speaker turned on — ostensibly for everyone to listen in. Chouhan is heard apologising to Asha and promising her a new house and financial aid. Unfortunately for Chouhan though, Asha retorts saying she doesn’t want his money and that the CM should “just send my husband home”.

But by now, Rawat’s misery was no longer his own. It had turned into something much bigger. He had been projected as a mascot of the oppression tribals continued to face by caste elites. Chouhan’s staged show of solidarity with Rawat was touted as further evidence of the BJP’s fake concern for indigenous people. The Congress, aching for an electoral victory since the BJP toppled its Kamal Nath-led government in March 2020, saw in this appalling episode the alluring promise of projecting itself as a champion of adivasi asmita (tribal pride) and reviving its hold on the ST-reserved seats of MP, which the party had swiftly lost to the BJP between 2003 and 2018.

Chouhan’s evidently desperate damage-control manoeuvres, ironically, proved counter-productive. Notably, most senior MP BJP leaders kept a studied silence on the controversy, leaving the CM to fend for himself. The incident came in the midst of the ruling party’s aggressive attempts to woo the state’s tribal population ahead of an election in which a strong wave of anti-incumbency is already palpable.

Just three days before the incident, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited the state’s tribal-dominated Shahdol district and stridently courted the adivasi community by announcing year-long celebrations in the state, beginning October 5, to mark the 500th birth anniversary of the 16th Century Gond (the second largest tribe in MP) queen, Rani Durgavati and promising a memorial dedicated to her in Jabalpur. The PM also launched a national mission to combat Sickle Cell Anaemia, a genetic disease with high prevalence among the tribals of MP and neighbouring Chhattisgarh.

In June, the BJP had launched five simultaneous yatras — collectively called the Veerangana Rani Durgavati Gaurav Yatra — across the tribal-dominated areas of MP. The yatra was a continuation of the BJP’s outreach targeted at tribals, which began soon after Chouhan returned as CM for a fourth term following the fall of the Nath government. Celebrating tribal icons such as Rani Durgavati and Rani Kamlapati, the 18th Century Gond queen of Bhopal, as well as Indian freedom fighter Birsa Munda, has been integral to this outreach mission. The saffron party has also been leveraging the election of Droupadi Murmu as India’s first tribal woman President to win favour with the adivasis and Modi too made it a point to harp about this when he visited Shahdol.

“The PeeGate controversy has hit the BJP hard. For the last three years, the party has been trying to regain its hold on the tribal community. Tribals and dalits in MP had traditionally been Congress voters but since 2003 both these blocs, which together have 82 assembly seats reserved for them (47 for STs and 35 for SCs), had switched almost en masse to the BJP. When the BJP came to power in 2003, 2008 and 2013, it consistently won between 55 to 70 of these seats, which is more than 50 per cent of the simple majority mark of 116 seats in the MP Assembly. In 2018, the Congress’s return to power was propelled by the shift of the ST and SC seats back to its fold as the party won 45 of the 82 reserved seats while the BJP could only win 33 of these,” said Bhopal-based political commentator Rakesh Dixit.

In 2018, the Congress had won 29 of the 45 ST reserved seats. “This has continued to worry the BJP… The BJP knows all its efforts to win over tribals can be jeopardised because of the Sidhi incident, especially because it has happened so close to the assembly election. The Congress will do all it can to keep the PeeGate incident fresh in public memory and, hereon, any incident of atrocity against tribals or Dalits in the state will be picked up by the Congress as a reminder of what happened in Sidhi. For the BJP, this will be very troubling because neighbouring Chhattisgarh, which also has an overwhelming tribal population, also goes to polls alongwith MP and the Congress there is already in a strong position,” Dixit adds.

To make matters worse for the BJP, while Chouhan’s melodramatic response to the Sidhi incident has done little to assuage the sense of hurt among the tribals, it has earned the government the wrath of the electorally formidable Brahmin community, particularly in the Vindhyachal region. Chouhan’s bulldozer justice, which razed part of Parvesh Shukla’s home, has been condemned by local Brahmin leaders and the MP chapter of the All India Brahman Sabha has threatened to move the MP High Court on grounds that Shukla’s family was unjustly punished for his crime.

Though MP as a whole has a miniscule 5 per cent Brahmin population, the community has a sizeable presence and electoral domination in the Vindhyachal districts of Satna, Sidhi and Rewa. Anger among the Brahmins is a bad sign for the BJP in election season as, like with the tribals between 2003 and 2018, the party had successfully courted the Brahmins too. Of the 19 assembly seats spread across Rewa, Satna and Sidhi, seven had elected Brahmin MLAs in 2018 – six of them, including Kedarnath Shukla, from the BJP.

The BJP had been consistently gaining ground across Vindhyachal ever since the demise of former MP chief minister Arjun Singh, former MP Assembly Speaker Sriniwas Tiwari and former minister Indrajeet Patel – all Congress veterans from this region. The Congress’ electoral strength in Vindhyachal lay in its ability to simultaneously project strong leaders from the Brahmin, Thakur and Kurmi communities that dominate the political landscape of the region. However, over the past two decades, the BJP had steadily carved its foothold across Vindhyachal by wooing not just the Brahmins, Thakurs and Kurmis but also the tribals and smaller backward caste communities to its side.

In the 2018 assembly election that saw the Congress bounce back power in the state with a 114-seat tally after a 15-year hiatus, what stopped the party from winning a comfortable majority in the 230-member Vidhan Sabha was its rout across the Vindhyachal region, particularly in the Baghelkhand division. Of the 26 assembly seats spread across Rewa, Satna, Sidhi, Shahdol and Singrauli districts of Baghelkhand, the BJP had swept 23 segments while the Congress could win only three constituencies. The BJP’s comprehensive victory in these districts had given the party confidence that its hold across the various voting blocs — Brahmins, Thakurs, Kurmis, tribals and backward castes — in Vindhyachal had remained intact despite the Congress’s revival in the rest of the state.

Now, with anger building up among adivasis on one hand and turmoil among the Brahmins, on the other, over the BJP’s response to the same incident, Chouhan has every reason to be worried ahead of the elections. Veteran Congress MLA and tribal leader Bala Bachchan told The Federal that his party plans to raise the pitch on atrocities against tribals and Dalits under BJP rule in the days to come. Meanwhile, with Nath’s penchant for also playing the Hindutva card almost as brazenly as the BJP, the Congress is also hoping to revive its hold on the Brahmin community; aided substantially by a recently acquired ‘Sadhvi’, 32-year-old katha vachak Richa Goswami, who the party has appointed as chief of its newly created religion cell and tasked with touring the state to “combat BJP’s brand of Hindutva”.

Chouhan and the BJP, thus, have enough reasons to be rattled by the Sidhi incident and the chief minister’s overt display of compassion and benevolence towards Dashmat Rawat is just another desperate stratagem aimed at cutting the party’s losses in an election year.

Dashmat RawatKol tribalsMadhya Pradesh electionsParvesh ShuklaPeegateShivarj Singh ChouhanShivarj Singh Chouhan
Puneet Nicholas Yadav
About the AuthorPuneet Nicholas Yadav
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