AZAD FACTOR

Chandrashekhar Azad of the Bhim Army certainly understands the power of optics. On February 12, he organised a massive rally in Bhopal, which was attended by OBC, Dalit and tribal groups, and announced that his Azad Samaj Party (ASP) will contest all 230 seats in Madhya Pradesh and elect a chief minister and deputy CMs from marginalised groups if it won. The rally was held ostensibly as a show of strength against an antireservation meet organised by the Karni Sena Parivar in Bhopal in January, in which it had slammed the BJP for continuing with caste-based reservations.

With assembly polls in the state just months away, Azad wants to build a coalition of backward, SC and ST communities. In doing so, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which projects itself as the main voice of marginalised groups in the state, remains its key challenger. On the other hand, things have turned tricky for both Congress and the BJP. While the Karni Sena rally made the Congress happy, Azad’s rally in Bhopal delighted the BJP as it threatened to pull away the Congress’s traditional vote bank.

However, will Azad’s entry really matter? His performance in the Uttar Pradesh polls did not match up to his media popularity. To have any bargaining power in MP, he’ll have to win the support of both SCs and STs, who together account for 37 per cent of the state’s population. “Organising a rally is one thing, contesting elections another,” says state BSP chief Ramakant Pippal. Political analysts, too, aren’t very excited. “Any leader from outside MP won’t be able to impact the election unless he or she has been working in the state for a long time. Such shows of strength are meant to bargain with mainstream parties,” says poll analyst Girija Shankar.

Azad’s rally, thus, is a grand gesture, but whether it can spark any real shift depends on the groundwork the ASP manages to put in ahead of the polls. ■