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BJP shifts venue of national executive meeting to Delhi

Special Correspondent

Left parties condemn “unprovoked firing” on Gujjars

Up in arms: Gujjars armed with lathis block the railway track near Bayana village in Bharatpur on Saturday. — Photo: PTI

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party has decided to shift its national executive committee meeting, proposed to be held by the end of this month, from Jaipur to Delhi, even as agitating Gujjars died in police firing in Rajasthan for the second consecutive day on Saturday and the Left parties strongly condemned the Rajasthan government for the “unprovoked firing” on the “peaceful agitators.”

On Friday night the BJP’s core committee met to discuss the serious situation which had left about a dozen people dead. Since then the number has gone up, with police firing reported from Dausa on Saturday.

Last year, around the same time, 26 people died in police firing when the Gujjars spearheaded an agitation demanding Scheduled Tribe status which, they said, was a poll promise made by the BJP ahead of the 2003 Assembly polls. At that time too, the party was forced to shift a planned party meet to another venue. The Gujjars are now included in the Other Backward Classes category.

On Saturday afternoon, the BJP top brass once again reviewed the situation at a meeting of office-bearers. As the violence had not abated — it has spread from Bharatpur district on Friday to Dausa on Saturday — the party decided it could not risk a national executive meeting in Jaipur that was to have got under way on May 31. The proposed three-day meet has now been shortened to a two-day affair on June 1 and 2 and will be held in Delhi, party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said immediately after the meeting.

Unprovoked firing: CPI

The Communist Party of India (CPI) on Saturday condemned the “unprovoked police firing” on the “peacefully agitating Gujjars” in Rajasthan and held the BJP government in the State responsible for the stalemate.

In a statement, the CPI said: “It is the BJP regime in Rajasthan which is solely responsible for playing politics with the Gujjars on the one side and the Scheduled Tribes on the other. In a democracy, these contentious issues should be settled through dialogue and negotiations and not by letting loose the police on the agitators.”

The party demanded adequate compensation for the families of those who had lost their lives in the firing.

In a related statement, CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation demanded the resignation of the Vasundhara Raje government. Recalling the violence over the same issue in the State last year, the CPI (ML) noted that the government had once again resorted to the tactics of brutal suppression of the democratic aspirations of the Gujjars.

Jaipur had earlier been selected by the BJP as the venue of a three-day meeting to give the party added political mileage ahead of the Assembly elections due later this year. Senior party leaders said they could not risk any untoward incident in Jaipur where 150-odd top party leaders would have gathered.

Moreover, the State police were fully engaged in controlling the Gujjar agitation. After the recent bomb explosions in Jaipur, the party had maintained that it would go ahead with the national executive committee meeting in Jaipur as it wanted to send a strong signal that it would not be frightened away by terrorists.

Led by party president Rajnath Singh, the BJP offered condolences to the families of those killed in the violence. The party has also appealed to all to help maintain peace. The party was of the view that the State government had done everything possible and had taken all the necessary steps to restore normality.

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