BJP-Sena to do soul-searching in April
Syed Firdaus Ashraf in Bombay
The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena, which were routed in the general election from Maharashtra, will undertake a joint soul-searching exercise in the first week of April.
The alliance, which bagged 33 out of 48 seats in the 1996 election, faired poorly by winning only 10 seats this time. Worse, the BJP's defence minister in the short-lived Vajpayee government of 1996, Pramod Mahajan, was himself trounced in a Bombay constituency by the Congress's Gurudas Kamat.
Pramod Tawde, general secretary of the BJP's Maharashtra unit, told Rediff On The NeT, "We will analyse the situation on the ground after we lost 23 seats in Maharashtra to the Congress-Republican Party-Samajwadi Party alliance."
The original plan was to conduct the soul-searching soon after the shattering poll results came in, but it was postponed to April since the parties expected the earlier schedule to clash with A B Vajpayee's swearing-in ceremony and the BJP's national executive meeting to be held on March 21 and 22.
"We will draw up a strategy so that we don't face a similar debacle in the assembly election two years hence," added Tawde.
Besides Rajasthan, Maharashtra is the only state where the BJP suffered a humiliating defeat. While Rajasthan gave in to the anti-incumbency factor, in Maharashtra the defeat owed more to the Congress's strategic tie-ups with the SP and the RPI.
Informed sources said the forthcoming session will discuss ways of wooing Dalits to the combine, since the community is supposed to have plumbed wholeheartedly for the Congress-RPI alliance in the recent election.
The state has a 20 per cent Dalit population, of whom neo-Buddhists comprise seven per cent and scheduled castes and tribes the rest.
Among the major decisions that will be taken in the first week of April, will be the induction of two more Dalits into the state cabinet. Currently, there are only two Dalits ministers, the BJP's Babban Gehlot, and the Sena's Dilip Kamble.
Ever since the Bombay police opened fire on July 11, 1997, at Ramabai Nagar, a Dalit stronghold, the community has been seething at the way the alliance government handled the situation. They were more aggrieved when Pramod Mahajan, the MP in whose constituency the area fell, did not visit the grief-stricken families. Apart from this, what set the minorities and Dalits against the ruling combine was that they were at the receiving end of the recent spate of slum demolitions.
"A strong undercurrent was running through the minds of Muslims and Dalits against our government. We underestimated their anger and strength, and realised it only after the results were out," admitted a senior state BJP leader.
Says Pramod Navalkar, transport minister and senior Shiv Sena leader, "The Sena leaders will meet on Sunday, March 15, to assess the situation arising from the election results. We will also discuss the meeting with the BJP at this session."
Elections '98
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