PM, SHAH REACH OUT TO DALITS
The Dalit agitation has clearly put the BJP government on the defensive: Prime Minister Narendra Modi was at pains on Wednesday to underscore that no other government had honoured the Dalit icon B R Ambedkar like his. The PM also said his government gave Ambedkar his rightful place in history and completed projects in his memory that were ignored by the previous government. Party president Amit Shah, in turn, asserted that the Central government would neither scrap the policy of reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in education and jobs, nor allow anyone to do so. Significantly, Shah also held the Congress and other opposition parties responsible for the deaths of nearly a dozen people in recent violence against the alleged dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
The Congress, sensing an opportunity in the BJP drift, has booked the Talkatora Stadium on April 23 for an all-India conference on the Dalit issue. The party feels that the government had rushed to the court with a review petition to douse the anger of Dalits but the court exposed had the BJP by telling the Attorney General that its judgment was based on the government's own pleadings and the data it had furnished.
The party also mounted a critical article on its website titled: PM Modi -- Listen to India's Jan Ki Baat before you do a Mann ki Baat about Dr B R Ambedkar,
The Congress leaders referred to the BJP ministers’ derogatory remarks against Dalits; they also harped on the lynching in the name of
beef and statue vandalism; the Modi government neither condemned, nor took any stringent action to curb them. It rather slashed the number of schemes and budget allocations for SCs and STs from the mandatory 4.25% of the total budget to a mere 2.5%.
"The sudden lover the PM has for Dr B R Ambedkar is nothing but another ‘jumla’ to cover up the gross neglect that the community has faced under his government. The anger against all of this manifested in the form of the Bharat Bandh," it underlined.