Opinion Acquiring land problems

My first reaction once I heard was to look up the official website of the Yamuna Expressway Authority,the nodal project agency,to run through the facts,and have a look at the list of villages notified under the project. The imprints of an arrogant government machinery was evident even here: any link to this important information had been severed. The government has its way.

The worst seems yet to come: after the killings and loss of several hours of Parliament’s time this past session,the state government — and the Centre too — is talking in terms of increasing the land value for compensation disbursal. Perhaps a judicial probe,some half-a-dozen transfers,some departmental enquiries — and the Yamuna Expressway project will go on unhindered. It is now being sold as if the poor farmers were up in arms for big money and not to save their ancestral land from the hands of the big corporates. Sadly.

The people in power who need to answer for the mess have an interesting take on the recent developments: good cut and paste delivery,with scriptwriters seemingly out of ideas. The food minister can comfortably state that the Supreme Court observation to distribute foodgrain to the poor,to save it from rotting away,was merely a “suggestion.” It took a second consecutive categoric order to get the idea to sink in with the United Progressive Alliance.

The UPA has one other shrewd strategy to ensure that attention is diverted from core issues. It has a brigade led by its general secretary,Rahul Gandhi,and the likes of general secretaries Digvijaya Singh and Janardhan Dwivedi,who always have a public correction statement handy for every blunder which the government commits. This is not a “disconnect” between the government and party — but a ploy.

It was not surprising to watch Rahul Gandhi mixing it up with the farmers and trying to play Robin Hood in western Uttar Pradesh after the police firings. Gandhi,whose first declared ambition was to win over the state of Uttar Pradesh,may have been doing this to outshine his own virtual ally Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and its leadership.

We in the opposition can only hope that the farmers are given justice — and we may not mind if the government wishes to give the credit to its young MP,as in the case of Vedanta. Indeed,we hope the UPA tries to put its own house in order before the next Independence Day — and not wait for the situation in our rural hinterlands to worsen. After all,there are many other better ways to create a space in which your young leadership can come to the front.

A rough macro-analysis of the performance of a government led by an economist prime minister in the last year-plus boils down to: a deteriorating price rise situation; his faux pas on issues of foreign policy like the virtual admission of “fomenting trouble” in Balochistan; the vulnerability of political parties under CBI pressure and thus their abstaining and giving of a free hand to the government in Parliament; and an incoherent ministerial group,where alliance ministers chose to defy principles of collective responsibility. Should they not stop and think?

The writer is a BJP MP and spokesman