Date:25/05/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/05/25/stories/2008052559390800.htm

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BJP shifts venue of national executive meeting to Delhi

Special Correspondent

Having Jaipur as the venue may pose risk in the wake of the Gujjar agitation

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party has decided to shift its national executive committee meeting, proposed to be held by the end of this month, from Jaipur to Delhi, even as agitating Gujjars died in police firing in Rajasthan for the second day on Saturday.

On Friday night, the BJP’s core committee met to discuss the serious situation which left about a dozen people dead. Since then the number has gone up, with police firing reported from Dausa on Saturday.

Last year, around the same time, 26 people died in police firing when the Gujjars spearheaded an agitation demanding Scheduled Tribe status which, they said, was a promise made by the BJP ahead of the 2003 Assembly polls. At that time too, the party was forced to shift a party meet to another venue.

The Gujjars are now included in the Other Backward Classes category.

On Saturday afternoon, the BJP top brass once again reviewed the situation at a meeting of office-bearers. As the violence did not abate — it spread from Bharatpur district on Friday to Dausa on Saturday — the party decided it could not risk a national executive meeting in Jaipur that was to get under way on May 31.

The three-day meet has now been shortened to a two-day affair on June 1 and 2, party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said immediately after the meeting.

Jaipur had been selected by the BJP as the venue of the meeting to give the party added political mileage ahead of the Assembly elections due later this year.

Senior party leaders said they could not risk any untoward incident in Jaipur where 150-odd top party leaders would have gathered.

Police engaged

Moreover, the State police were fully engaged in controlling the Gujjar agitation. After the recent bomb explosions in Jaipur, the party maintained that it would go ahead with the national executive committee meeting in Jaipur as it wanted to send a strong signal that it would not be frightened away by terrorists.

Led by party president Rajnath Singh, the BJP offered condolences to the families of those killed in the violence. The party has also appealed to all to help maintain the peace. The party was of the view that the State government had done everything possible and had taken all the necessary steps to restore normality.

Unprovoked firing: CPI

The Communist Party of India (CPI) condemned the “unprovoked police firing” on the “peacefully agitating Gujjars” and held the BJP government responsible for the stalemate.

In a statement, the CPI said: “It is the BJP regime in Rajasthan which is solely responsible for playing politics with the Gujjars, on one side, and the Scheduled Tribes, on the other. In a democracy, these contentious issues should be settled through dialogue and negotiations and not by letting loose the police on the agitators.”

The party demanded adequate compensation for the families of those who lost their lives in the firing.

In a related statement, the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation demanded the resignation of the Vasundhara Raje government. Recalling the violence over the same issue last year, the CPI (ML) noted that the government once again resorted to brutal suppression of the democratic aspirations of the Gujjars.