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Journalism of Courage
The sanyasin-street fighter of the Sangh Parivar has returned. Six years after she was thrown out of the BJP,Uma Bharti has been welcomed back to the fold. The induction comes a year before the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and at a time when political parties are furtively signalling their strategies for the Hindi heartland. BJP President Nitin Gadkari lost no time in assigning Bharti her operational area. For Bharti,who was in political wilderness in the years outside the BJP,unsuccessfully testing her independent political fortunes in Madhya Pradesh,a return to the BJP is necessary to retrieve for herself any kind of political weight in the national level and even a pale shadow of the clout that she enjoyed during and after the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. But Bharti,the OBC leader in saffron,has become essential for the BJP as well.
Before Bhartis return,the pre-poll narrative on Uttar Pradesh had centred on the three other contenders: the BSP,the Congress,the SP. The BJP,which finished a distant fourth in Uttar Pradesh in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls,seemed almost written off. Bharti is presumably the BJPs trump card to mobilise OBC voters who had deserted them with Kalyan Singh,and who could not be galvanised by its upper-crust leaders like Kalraj Singh or Rajnath Singh. With Bharti,the BJP,like the Congress,is trying to exploit the perception of drift in the Samajwadi Party and pick apart Mulayam Singh Yadavs vote base. Bhartis arrival could point to two movements at the same time: an attempt to woo the OBCs and a return to the hardline Sangh basics,to the politics of the 1990s in Uttar Pradesh.
