Friday, January 4, 2013

The Dalit gambit

Meira Kumar’s elevation as Speaker is the Congress’s first major offensive to retake the Dalit vote.

When Meira Kumar left the Congress in a huff nine years ago for a very short freelance stint and returned after promises made by Sonia Gandhi, she could scarcely believe that the Congress president would keep her words in such grand style.

Her elevation as Speaker of the Lok Sabha recently could be rightly considered Sonia’s first deft move to get back the estranged Dalit vote bank and would be seen to be particularly helpful in the case of Bihar where Meira’s father Jagjivan Ram once constituted the Dalit bulwark of the Congress party.

Meira’s estrangement with the Congress began in 2000, reportedly at the instigation of Sitaram Kesri. Kesri seems to have sensed Meira’s dark mood. According to party insiders, she was considered as close to Kesri, a fact not unknown to Sonia. The fact was that Jagjivan Ram’s high profile daughter was sidelined in party affairs because Congress had all but forgotten Ram’s contribution to strengthening its great rainbow coalition. Things reached such a pass that the Congress party was unwilling to accommodate her demand of declaring 10 Krishna Menon marg as a Smarak or memorial in memory of her legendary ‘Babuji’. It took then a BJP Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to do the honours. But Sonia Gandhi was keen to make amends. Veteran Bhajan Lal – once a foot solider of her father – was deputed to woo her back. Meira was positively reassured when she talked directly to Sonia herself. Her return then was a question of detail.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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