| Published on 06-02-2008 In National |
| Viewed 1249 times |
| Riding pillion on Bikes MP CM hopes to get votes |
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Written by
N.D.Sharma |
The Madhya Pradesh chief minister's latest fad is to reach some town by helicopter, catch hold of a motorcycle-wala, perch on the pillion and ask him to drive to a village. There he would ask whoever was present if they had any grievances. He would order transfer of one government functionary and suspension of another. He would then return home with a magnificent delusion that his government was working well.
Shivraj Singh Chauhan's delusion sometime reaches the outer fringe of sanity. As when he took the motorcycle-wala to a police station in Datia district and asked the Munshi on duty how much they charged for registering a complaint. The Munshi replied with folded hands that no payment was required for lodging the report. Who says the police department in Madhya Pradesh is corrupt?
With the chief minister's photographs appearing in the newspapers almost daily and with so much publicity material containing his photographs being distributed regularly across the State by his government, it must be a daft police officer that would fail to recognise him. Then the authoritative tone with which the query was made must have been enough to convey to the experienced policeman if the man on the pillion of the motorcycle was really an aggrieved villager!
What do the people tell him? That the sarpanch demands Rs 500 for issuing the BPL (below the poverty line) card; that the police commit atrocities on the people; that the teachers do not attend the schools regularly; that the mid-day meal arrangement is not satisfactory; that kerosene is not regularly available; that there is no medical facility available in the area; that there is no road; that there is no water for drinking; that there is no water for irrigation and the crops are drying out; that there is no electricity; that there are no jobs available; and so on.
Is it to learn this that the chief minister is frittering away public money on his gimmicks at the fag end of the BJP's five-year term? He would have known about these problems, and more, by going through his party's manifesto for the 2003 elections and the election promises made during the campaign by the State BJP party leaders. (However, it was a different matter if his real intention is to see with his own eyes how the BJP government has miserably failed to fulfil its promises during the four years).
Even as Chauhan was pillion-riding motorcycles, thousands of gurujis (one of the numerous categories of teachers appointed by the State government), men and women of all ages and from all parts of the State, had assembled in Bhopal to remind the BJP leaders of their promises to ensure parity in the wages paid to gurujis and regular teachers. For over a week, they had been sitting on dharna during the day and spending nights in the open in this excruciatingly cold weather. The BJP leaders who had assiduously wooed them during the election campaign with promises of making them regular did not even find time to see them. On an earlier occasion, the contract teachers had come to Bhopal with a similar demand and the baton-happy policemen welcomed them and quite a number of them had landed in the hospitals.
Chauhan may have gloated over the Munshi's declaration at the Datia district police station that no money is charged for registering an FIR, but his own Director General of Police A.R.Pawar is on record as having observed that it was not possible to get an FIR lodged without bribing the thanedar. Pawar's observation was endorsed by then Minister of State for Home Nagendra Singh. He had called the policemen as thieves and had, though, added that the BJP knew how to take work from thieves. (The Home department has since been taken away from Nagendra Singh).
It is a moot point as to what work the BJP leaders must be taking from these "thieves", but it certainly is not providing protection to the citizens and ensuring the rule of law. Because there is hardly any semblance of law and order in the State. Even the capital city of Bhopal, which is constantly under the glare of the media, witnesses a major crime every alternate day. Chain snatching from women in market places in daytime is almost a daily occurrence. Whenever a big crime takes place or there is a spate of crimes in a short time, the police catch hold of an ISI agent or capture a group of persons planning to commit a dacoity, apparently to draw the people's attention away from the real crime. A former Bhopal SP had a knack for arresting cycle-thieves whenever a sensational murder or dacoity was committed in the city.
The Chauhan government was still patting itself over the elimination of the dacoit menace in the Chambal region when an Indore industrialist, on his way from Gwalior to Indore, was kidnapped near Shivpuri and was released only after payment of a huge amount in ransom; some wags put the figure at Rs two crore. Inspector General of Police Sanjeev Kumar Singh, who was heading the Special Task Force (STF) constituted to secure the release of the industrialist, was returning to Bhopal from Gwalior by train, along with his gunmen, when someone took away his laptop and mobile. He had just reached Bhopal when the report came that the teenage son of a Gwalior industrialist had been kidnapped from the city itself. The ransom demand for his release was put at Rs ten lakh.
If peremptory visits to villages could have made the government machinery efficient and responsive, the people of Madhya Pradesh would have probably had not thrown out the Congress government in 2003. Digvijay Singh had a great penchant for visiting villages regularly by helicopter (he had no fancy for pillion riding). He could not change the ways of the bureaucracy, so he changed his own language. Now, he would say, the people in the villages made only suggestions, as they had no more complaints to make. What it meant, in effect, was that if the people earlier complained that the doctor never visited the dispensary and even medicines were not available there, they now 'suggested' that the doctor should be made to visit the dispensary regularly and medicines should also be made available there.
It's not for nothing that Sonia Gandhi has picked up Digvijay Singh to help Rahul Gandhi learn the intricacies of contemporary politics. |
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