Morbi bridge collapse: At heart of it, a municipality ruled by BJP for decades, no Opp since last year

“How can the municipality President and CO say they didn’t know about Jaysukh Patel (Managing Director of Oreva) throwing the bridge open to tourists, when Patel did a press conference at the approach of the bridge and thousands were visiting it since the Gujarati New Year on October 26. If they indeed didn’t know, then it demonstrates incompetence and they have no right to occupy those posts,” says Raju Kavar, president of the Morbi town unit of the Congress.

Kavar also calls the MoU between the municipality and Oreva an example of the “failure” of the public private partnership model first promoted by Narendra Modi as chief minister of the state, starting 2005. “The BJP government can’t manage a bridge of such historic importance and having tourism value. This shows its claims of development are hollow,” Kavar says.

The BJP has been overwhelmingly dominant in Morbi for nearly four decades now, and has ruled the municipality almost continuously since 1986. Since 2021, after it won all the 52 seats in the municipality, there is no Opposition left in the civic body.

In all this time, the Congress has been in-charge of the Morbi municipality for merely two-and-a-half years, for two brief stints between 2015 and 2021.

Morbi municipality president Kusum Parmar calls it “evidence of the people’s trust in the politics of development of the BJP”.

Parmar also says their hands are tied, largely by the BJP state government. “The municipality’s Roads and Buildings Department hasn’t had a regular engineer for more than a decade. Our requests for new recruitments are pending with the state government. Our pleas for notifying Morbi town as a municipal corporation are also pending with the state government. We have no capacity to maintain such structures (like the suspension bridge that collapsed) in such a situation,” Parmar says.

Parmar won her maiden election to the Morbi municipality in 2015 and then retained her seat in 2021. Her husband Karamshi Parmar is the treasurer of the Kisan Cell in the BJP’s Morbi district unit.

The municipality has had the ownership of the bridge, built in 1887 and known as Jhulto Pul for its swaying movement due to its suspension structure, since 1960-61, when the royal family transferred the same to it. But as the structure got older, its maintenance cost started increasing incrementally.

Simultaneously, the advent of motorised transport meant the importance of Jhulto Pul as a utility dwindled, replaced by Pada Pul, a motorable bridge a few hundred metres downstream. The cable-stayed Jhulto Pul, 765-feet long and 4-feet wide, became more a tourist attraction.

The tipping point was the devastating Gujarat earthquake of 2001 that damaged the western approach of the bridge. It was then that the Morbi municipality, with no resources to repair the approach, started looking out. The abolition of octroi in 2004 further made civic bodies in Gujarat dependent on state funds as they lost their powers to charge levies on goods entering their jurisdictions.

Tulshi Bhanushali (65), a hotelier in the town, says: “There is no public garden nor any other space for recreation in Morbi town. The Jhulto Pul and Mani Mandir are the only such places for residents of Morbi. Both were damaged in the quake, and the civic body had to do something about them.”

In 2008, with the active involvement of then collector of Rajkot district, the Morbi municipality signed an MoU with AMPL, handing over the latter operations and maintenance for the next 10 years. Towards the end of this contract, AMPL wanted to increase the ticket rates citing increasing maintenance costs. But the civic body refused.

Therefore, AMPL didn’t show any interest in extending the MoU and the bridge remained closed temporarily. It was finally with the intervention of the Morbi collector (the district was carved out of Rajkot and Surendranagar in 2013) that the municipality agreed to a partial increase in ticket rates, and eventually the AMPL signed a new MoU in March this year, handing the private firm its operations and maintenance for 15 years.

The Congress says the Morbi bridge collapse has punctured the BJP claims of development, and that it has managed to stick to power by “deceiving” people.

“Morbi’s politics centres around caste and the Patidars dominate it since they are the single largest group of organised voters and have leadership and money. The BJP fans such divisions and rakes up communal issues at election time. The Congress, on the other hand, is all-inclusive and started fighting the Morbi municipality elections on the party’s symbol only 2000 onwards,” says Mahesh Rajyaguru, general secretary of the Morbi district unit of the Congress, who served as a councillor in the municipality between 1990 and 2021.

Of the 52 councillors of the municipality, at least 16 are Patidars.

So, will the bridge collapse be a poll issue in the coming Assembly elections? “We are pained by the loss of lives and don’t want to politicise it. But we will be failing in our duty if we don’t expose the failures of the BJP which led to this disaster. Therefore, we will certainly highlight these failures during our campaign,” says Lalit Kagathara, the working president of the Congress and the sitting MLA from Tankara Assembly seat in Morbi district.