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| Anand Agrawal | Posted
on 15-Dec-02 12:16 PM
BJP stuns Congress in Rajasthan By Kamla Bora in Jaipur Rediff On The Net Sunday, December 15, 2002 The Bharatiya Janata Party stunned Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot's Congress government in Rajasthan by winning all three by-elections to the state assembly. The BJP not only retained the Bali seat, which fell vacant after its leader Bhairon Singh Shekhawat was elected India's vice-president, but also wrested Sagwara from the Congress and Bansur from the Bahujan Samaj Party. The BJP won the Bali and Sagwara seats by large margins of over 13,000 votes. The Congress posed some resistance in Bansur, where it restricted the BJP's winning margin to 2,000 votes. The Congress suffered its worst defeat in Sagwara, reserved for scheduled tribe candidates, in southern Rajasthan near the Gujarat border. The seat, which the Congress has won regularly, went the saffron way with the RSS and its affiliates active in the tribal area after the Godhra incident in neighbouring Gujarat. The saffron wave was so strong that Congress candidate Surendra Kumar failed to take advantage of the sympathy factor generated by his father Bhikha Bhai's death which caused the by-election. In Bali, the Congress also faced problems from party rebel Meetha Lal Jain, a former member of the Lok Sabha who entered the poll fray as an Independent candidate. Playing the caste card by fielding a Gurjar, Sardara Ram, did help the Congress in Bansur either. The BJP, which won just 33 seats of the state's 200 assembly seats in the 1998 election, has gained some critical momentum before next year's poll, mainly due to popular disenchantment with the Gehlot government. Many analysts blame Gehlot for the state of affairs. The chief minister, they say, has concentrated all power with himself. Although he does not hold any portfolio, his detractors say his writ runs across all departments making ministers mere puppets. The by-election results will make Gehlot's position shaky for the first time after the 1998 assembly election. It will now be more difficult for the chief minister to control his detractors in the Congress by political maneuvering. The results will also boost the leadership of Union Minister of State for Small Scale Industries Vasundhara Raje, the BJP's new state president. Her supporters can now brush aside the opposition from senior state BJP leaders who resent her style of functioning. |
| bipin | Posted
on 15-Dec-02 01:06 PM
http://www.ektaonline.org/ THE GUJARAT MASSACRES: THE COST OF SILENCE download pdf The state of Gujarat in India once renowned as the home of the peace activist, Mahatma Gandhi, is today home to over 100,000 victims of recent communal violence, most of them Muslims. Of these numbers, over 2000 were brutalized and killed in every way imaginable and in ways till now unimaginable--stoned; burned alive with kerosene; stabbed; butchered; raped and burned; and, raped and cut open with fetuses removed, displayed on a tip of a sword and then discarded in fires. The unfortunate survivors that witnessed entire families erased continue to suffer in over-crowded make-shift relief camps and now face a different specter of death in the form of disease, an unrelenting heat wave, the approaching monsoon, and starvation. The violence in Gujarat began soon after an incident on February 27, 2002, when the Sabarmati Express was stopped near Godhra and several compartments were torched leading to the death of 58 Hindu passengers, including women and children. While conflicting reports exist about the exact sequence of events, it is clear that a confrontation between Hindutva activists returning from the controversial site of Ayodhya and the mainly Muslim residents of Godhra escalated to the point of the train being deliberately set on fire. What ensued in the wake of the heinous attack on the Sabarmati Express was a state-wide retaliatory carnage of unimaginable proportions the social, psychological and economical damages of which defy quantification. Immediately following the train incident at Godhra, frenzied Hindu mobs across the state of Gujarat unleashed their fury on the Muslim population by brutalizing and obliterating entire families and neighborhoods, looting their property, and destroying places of worship. To date, the numbers are as follows: over 2000 dead and buried in mass graves, over 100,000 in inadequate relief camps, and an estimated Rs. 10, 000 crore ($2 billion) in property damage. The unaccounted damage to the people of Gujarat as a whole, to the cause of communal harmony, and to India as a nation far exceeds these numbers. As NGOs and activists for communal harmony seek ways to bring relief and justice to the victims of the Gujarat massacre, fact-finding reports point to the following critical findings: State participation and complicity in communal violence in Gujarat: The rest can be found in the link. |