Proposed central body for region’s welfare makes Maya see red.
Bundelkhand has become the new battleground for the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh. The two parties have been at daggers drawn for sometime now with no sign of improvement in relations.
Though Bundelkhand saw a fiercely-contested electoral battle between the two rivals in the 2007 UP assembly election and the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the latest war of words was triggered by the Centre’s decision to constitute an independent Bundelkhand Development Authority (BDA) for the region. Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati called the step unconstitutional, while the Congress hailed it as a historic move.
“What has Mayawati done for the development of the region?” asked Union minister of state and Jhansi MP Pradip Jain. “Farmers are still committing suicide and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act funds are not reaching the poor. What is Mayawati’s problem if the Centre takes an initiative to develop the region?”
But Mayawati has her own take. “The proposal to set up a centrally-controlled authority for Bundelkhand will hit at the very basis of Centre-state relations and violate the Constitution,” she wrote in a letter to prime minister Manmohan Singh. “Development of this region should be delinked from petty politics,” she said.
Congress sources said BDA was the brainchild of AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh, who is in charge of UP affairs. Singh was twice the CM of Madhya Pradesh. A large part of Bundelkhand falls in that state. In fact, a Bundelkhand Development Council was first established by then Madhya Pradesh CM Arjun Singh in 1982. It did not accomplish much and became defunct after some years.
After Independence, Bundelkhand became a stronghold of the Congress. But the party started losing ground in the late’ 80s. In view of the 2012 UP assembly elections, the party leadership feels that there’s no better place to kick-start its revival than in Bundelkhand. It is perhaps this objective which prompted Rahul Gandhi to extensively tour the region.
Other than Mayawati, Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Chauhan of the BJP has opposed the BDA plan. This suits the Congress gameplan perfectly as the party has often insinuated that Mayawati and the BJP have a secret pact.
UP Congress media unit chairman Vivek Singh, who is a legislator from Bundelkhand, said: “The Mayawati government fails to realise that this region is geographically and culturally different from the rest of UP. It has special development needs which no government has recognised or catered to in the past 20 years.”
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