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In remarks laced with sarcasm, SP leader Azam Khan has said Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi is an 'innocent child' who reads from the dais whatever is given to him in writing.
"Rahul is an innocent child...though Ramdev too calls him so, but I will call him innocent as he reads whatever is given to him in writing," the UP Cabinet Minister told reporters in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, on Friday night.
Related: Seven things that Rahul Gandhi said during UP rallies
He claimed that Rahul had called saw mills plywood factories while addressing a rally in the state. On Rahul's allegation that the SP government is triggering riots, Khan hit back saying "It was Congress which laid the foundation of communal clashes."
"Congress ruled the country for more than 50 years after Independence and it triggered numerous riots," Khan alleged.
Rahul Gandhi should become next Prime Minister: Shinde
Azam, who was here to meet the family of five persons of minority community who were murdered, said that he is satisfied with the working of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav.
Azam said the day he would feel that Akhilesh was not living up to the expectations, he would be the first person to withdraw from the government.
When asked about his recent meeting with controversial Independent MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya, who was yesterday re-inducted into the UP Cabinet, Khan said he met the MLA as he honours human relationship very much.
Azam said that the meeting turn out to be a boon for Raja Bhaiya as he got Cabinet rank the very next day.
Raja Bhaiya was re-inducted into the UP Cabinet on Friday, seven months after he had to step down in the wake of killing of DSP Zia-ul-Haq in Pratapgarh.
By M N Buch
Published: 24th September 2013 07:25 AM
Last Updated: 24th September 2013 07:27 AM
Muzaffarnagar is a district in Uttar Pradesh, the headquarters of which is about a hundred miles from Delhi on the main highway leading to Roorkee, Dehradun and beyond. The district is largely canal irrigated and known as the sugarcane capital of India. It is, therefore, a prosperous district. Its population is divided between different castes and religions, but Muslims form about 18.5 per cent, and there is also a sizeable number of Jats. When Chaudhary Charan Singh was the dominant leader in UP he had an electoral alliance in western UP between Jats and Muslims and by and large the communities co-existed without much friction.
Unfortunately since then the politics of UP has become highly divisive. The Samajwadi Party goes out of its way to woo Muslims voters, but on an appeal which is highly religious, communal and based on creating a sense of fear amongst the minorities about possible domination by the majority community. The Congress also woos the Muslims, tries to reach out to the scheduled castes and makes some overtures to upper caste Hindus. BJP's main strength is the upper caste Hindus and it is reaching out to the Jats for their support. VHP has scheduled caste support and Mayawati has been able to make some inroads into upper caste Hindu votes and a small segment of Muslim votes. Politics in UP has nothing to do with ideology, programmes, or a development agenda. Divisive politics has wrecked the UP administration almost completely.
Constitutionally it is the government's duty to promote an environment in which people can expect justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. All this can only happen in a country where there is law and order and internal peace, as also security from external aggression. Parliament may legislate on the defence of India, the maintenance of armed forces and deployment of armed forces of the Union in aid of civil power. It is within the jurisdiction of the state legislature to legislate on all matters relating to public order and for the maintenance of a police force. Both Parliament and the state legislature can legislate on all matters relating to criminal law and criminal procedure. Not only is the state duty-bound to maintain public order, but it has the legislative competence to enact laws in this regard.
Among other laws is the Police Act which governs the whole of India and other acts that apply to specific areas, such as the Delhi Police Act. The Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) provides for the creation of an executive magistracy which, together with the police, is charged with the duty of maintaining public order. For this both preventive and coercive powers are vested in the magistrates and police. The public are required to assist magistrates and the police in maintaining order and preventing crime. The scheme of law, therefore, is that whereas the state has to provide the legal wherewithal for the executive magistracy and the police to function, it is for the magistrate and police to exercise legal powers and maintain public order.
In matters of maintaining order the district magistrate is king and the SP is both prime minister and commander-in-chief. The situation rapidly changed in the 1970s and politicians began to take over the micro-management of law and order. In West Bengal the Left Front government ordered that the police would not intervene in industrial disputes, despite the fact that workers were physically restraining the management's freedom of movement and that this amounted to the offence of illegal restraint and intimidation. The West Bengal police soon gave up any initiative in dealing with any law and order problem and on all issues it sought political clearance. That was the end of effective policing in the state and ushered in an era of lawlessness that was exploited first by Left Front workers and now by the Trinamool Congress. Once the police stopped functioning independently the virus of lawlessness assumed a dirty and virulent communal form.
In Muzaffarnagar and other districts of Western UP the district administration stands emasculated. Had it been strong it would have reacted very quickly and forcefully when the very first incident took place in which a Muslim boy and two Jat boys were killed. Obviously they could not because the government was wooing Muslims and Jats were extremely resentful of this. Something which could have been contained in the first one hour burst into flames and engulfed large parts of Meerut and Saharanpur divisions. Today we have the disgraceful situation of more than 50,000 people as refugees within a hundred miles of Delhi and they call this a government! The Centre's response is weak and indecisive. The home minister should have visited Muzaffarnagar on the very second day of the riot and warned the DM and SP that if within 12 hours the situation was not controlled the Centre would intervene and dismiss them without an enquiry under Article 311 (2) (b) and (c).
Its population is bigger than Brazil's. The way its people vote can decide the direction taken by world's largest democracy. No state in India is more important in the country's forthcoming general election than Uttar Pradesh, the underdeveloped northern state of 200m people.
Of the 814m eligible voters mentioned by the Election Commission when it announced the April and May polling dates this week, 134m are in Uttar Pradesh.
"To get to the centre the final checkpost is UP," says Amit Tulsian, a partner at KPMG. "You have to do well in UP to be a decisive electoral party in the centre and that hasn't happened in the last 20 years."
The state is at the heart of India's political battles. Last weekend, Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) addressed a rally in Lucknow, the state capital, while Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party spoke in the nearby industrial city of Kanpur. They are the two most prominent politicians in India today.
UP commands 80 of the 543 elected parliamentary seats in India's Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, making this a crucial battleground. This year, as the BJP storms ahead in opinion polls, UP is more important than ever.
"For the BJP, I think the importance goes beyond the simple arithmetic," says Anjalika Bardalai, south Asia specialist at Eurasia Group. "The party needs seats in the north to make up for the fact that it may not get so many seats in the south and east."
The Hindu nationalist BJP is currently set to secure between 170 and 180 seats in all, according to Sanjeev Prasad, head of research at Mumbai-based brokerage Kotak Institutional Equities. But the party needs some 200 to 210 seats if a Modi-led government is to come to power, and even then would need the support of allies to reach the 272 seats required for a parliamentary majority. That means the BJP needs 40 to 50 seats in UP alone. It won just 10 in the last election in 2009.
Modi and the party know what they need to do. The BJP rally on Sunday was an impressive organisational feat. Meals were provided for some 200,000 people, there were 3,000 policemen keeping order, and 29 trains and 5,200 buses were hired to bring supporters to the rally.
Modi's speech was rousing, if composed of a string of clichs. "Today it's a saffron wave - tomorrow it will be a saffron tsunami," he roared, referring to the BJP's party colour.
He rejected recent criticism from Mulayam Singh Yadav - a political strongman in the region from the Samajwadi Party (SP) whose son is UP chief minister - about the 2002 riots in Gujarat in which hundreds of Muslims were killed soon after Modi became Gujarat's chief minister.
And he also reminded the audience of the economic prosperity in Gujarat. "I want to ask the people of UP, do you get electricity? In your villages, cities, houses?" he asked. "Go to Gujarat and see - 24 hours a day, seven days a week you get electricity."
In the largely rural state of UP, caste and religion still sway voters. And since the 1990s the UP vote has become fragmented - to the detriment of the incumbent Congress party - with the rise of regional parties such as Yadav's.
A big question mark surrounds the Muslim community, which makes up nearly 20 per cent of the population. The handling of last year's communal riots in Muzaffarnagar in UP, in which 48 people were killed and thousands of Muslims fled their homes, could put the SP on the back foot. If Muslims in UP vote as a bloc, then the BJP is unlikely to succeed, but if the vote is split between various secular and regional parties, then the Hindu nationalist opposition stands a chance.
"Caste-based politics is notoriously fractious and I think there's a sense in which the BJP could benefit from being outside this," Bardalai adds.
As UP isn't a straight Congress versus BJP contest, it could be a four- or five- cornered fight where even a small swing in votes could change the results dramatically.
Onlookers say Modi could run from a Gujarat constituency to show his loyalty to the state he has led for over a decade. Alternatively, he could confirm his pan-India appeal by running from UP, a state where the BJP must do all it can to win votes and where former BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, represented the state capital.
"Traditionally, the symbolic value is that many prime ministers of India have come from UP," explains Amitabh Dubey, director at Trusted Sources, the emerging market researcher. "Because it's the largest state it's a heavy hitter and that carries some weight."