BJP resorts to sound and fury to make its presence felt
LUCKNOW: After the party’s big win in the Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears a bit too anxious to make things difficult for the state government in its bid to wrest power in the 2017 assembly polls.
This impression could be gaining ground as the party’s youth wing volunteers ended up with stitches and fractures after the pitched but unprovoked battle that they fought with the police outside the Vidhan Bhawan on Monday.
The agitation was ostensibly to raise issues of concern to the youth but it turned violent, leaving many injured.
According to one estimate, 150 Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) workers were injured after the police crackdown to control the rampaging cadre.
Immediately after the violence, an unapologetic state BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai compared the volunteers with freedom fighters and martyrs like Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh.
“Once the police pushed our brave young boys inside the party office, we could not have remained mute spectators. We are no Mahatma Gandhi, we are more like Azad and Bhagat Singh,” Bajpai boasted even as the ruling Samajwadi Party’s
SOME BELIEVE THAT THE BJP YOUTH WING, WHICH HADN’T DONE ANYTHING OF “NOTE” SO FAR AND HAD FAILED TO ATTRACT ENOUGH NUMBERS FOR THE MONDAY STIR, TRIED TO MAKE UP WITH NOISE AND CHAOS INSTEAD
most prominent Muslim face Azam Khan compared the BJP activists to “terrorists” wanting to invade the assembly.
Khan was reacting to police reports which said the BJP cadre was armed with high-decibel crude cracker bombs.
BJP spokesman Vijay Bahadur Pathak attacked Khan for comparing party workers to ‘terrorists.’ He asked if the theory about the party cadre ‘possessing highdecibel cracker bombs’ in the high-security zone outside the Vidhan Bhawan was correct, was it not then a failure of the state’s intelligence wing.
On his part, Swami Prasad Maurya (BSP), the leader of opposition in the assembly, said: “The BJP agitations these days have become a nightmare for the common man, who is suffering jams, diversions and other problems due to it.”
But why is there a sudden spurt in violence outside the BJP office in front of the Vidhan Bhawan? This is the third violent agitation outside the party office in recent times after the AAP-BJP faceoff during the Lok Sabha elections and the SP-BJP clash on June 21.
There are several versions to this. After its strong showing in UP in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP’s ambition is sky high. With a young RSS pracharak Sunil Bansal, 45, as the state general secretary (organisation), the party clearly wants to keep the momentum going till 2017 when the state assembly elections are due. Changes in the BJP state organisation, too, are expected after a new national chief is announced. Bansal had worked closely with party’s UP in-charge Amit Shah, who was instrumental in BJP’s landslide win in the state and is now in the running for the party’s top post.
“If Shah is elected as the BJP chief, as seems likely, Bansal will push Shah’s agenda in UP but neither Shah nor Bansal may be happy with such acts of unexplained violence,” a BJP insider said.
Some believe that the BJP youth wing, which hadn’t done anything of “note” so far and had failed to attract enough numbers for the Monday stir, tried to make up with noise and chaos instead.