Union Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu had gone through the rough and tumble of politics from a very young age. Guided by village elders, he first became a student union leader and went on to become one of the most senior leaders of the BJP. Tracing his roots to the Jana Sangh, Mr. Naidu said: “Those were the days when we used to make wall writings for the Jana Sangh. It was often ridiculed by opponents, who would make it ‘Bhojana Sangh’ by prefixing Jana Sangh with ‘bho’. And, one day, an elderly man from our village (Chavatapalem in Nellore district) asked why I (a die-hard non-vegetarian) preferred to join BJP which was perceived as a ‘vegetarian party’ dominated by Brahmins and Banias. After initial confusion, I realised that it was a political outfit in which I could eat both the egg and its mother,” Mr. Naidu observed.
Get arrested
to succeed
It is a regular affair for active politicians or activists to get arrested during protests against the government. These demonstrations often turn violent at the climax as almost mini-wars take place between the crowded protesters and the police force. At the end, the police overpower the protesters and dispatch them to various police stations. But what happens when the leaders fail to draw any crowd as was witnessed by newsmen at PNBS recently when less than a dozen leaders of a community gathered to obstruct movement of city buses. As the newsmen reached the spot there were none. A police man near by revealed that only about 11 persons came to protest and five of them claimed to be drivers of the leaders and escaped. The rest of the leaders casually boarded the police jeep and claimed to have been arrested, and everything happened in minutes suggesting that ‘arrests are an essential ingredient of protests’.
V. Raghavendra
& Tharun Boda