Attack aftermath: Raman Singh’s image takes a hit as Maoist fear looms large

By Parivesh Mishra Raipur: The deadly Maoist attack on a Congress motorcade on 25 May has driven politicians in Chhattisgarh into a shell. A week after the incident, the BJP is still on the defensive, unsure of itself and unusually quiet, and the Congress has not still not come over the utter confusion. A sense of fear is palpable among the political leaders and many at the local level, particularly in the Bastar region, are either lying low, virtually invisible, or have shifted temporarily to safer locations. After the Maoist attack, Chief Minister Raman Singh has abruptly dumped his state-wide Vikas Yatra—the BJP roadshow highlighting the government’s achievements—and returned to the state capital. There is no talk yet of the fate of his incomplete yatra. This has come as a dampener for the party workers, particularly in villages and mofussil towns. The image of the chief minister has taken a beating after this incident. All the way till the attacks it was Raman Singh alone who smiled from the hoardings, waved from the rooftops, and greeted with folded hands on the front pages of the newspapers every morning. The roads were flooded on one side with the government Vikas Yatra flags bearing his photograph and the party flags on the other. Raman Singh alone was projected as the man solely responsible for everything that had happened or was happening in the state.[caption id=“attachment_837411” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh. PTI[/caption] The Naxal attack shattered his carefully cultivated image of the able administrator. The campaign on which such a lot had come to depend looked absurd in the backdrop of the total lack of grip on the basics of administering law and order. It came as a deadly blow to his claims made earlier in the meetings of having successfully eliminated the Naxalite problem in some parts of the state and contained in the other. What later stood glaringly exposed was the absence of the government from a large part of the state’s map. That far from being contained the problem has been steadily spreading to hitherto unaffected districts and areas also was known to the police and people living in such districts. Now the lists of fresh “encounters” and “sightings” became the hot topics of public discussion. Sensing the public mood, the newspapers started carrying stories which were earlier not published as perhaps the Vikas Yatra ads had been eating up too much of space. As the initial shock gave way to a feeling of anger, the issue of governance—or the lack of it—came increasingly under the microscope of public opinion. Here Raman Singh the chief minister was found undefendable. And the party was made to calculate the price of merging two identities—that of a tough, no-nonsense leader like Narendra Modi and a silent achiever—into one. The leadership issue is at the centre of the Congress confusion too. With Nand Kumar Patel, the leader it had groomed to lead the party, gone, there seems to be no quick replacement around. Today it settled for Charan Das Mahant as the working president of the Pradesh Congress Committee. However, that does not mean an end to the leadership problem for the party. The moment the news of Patel leaving the scene surfaced on television screens, Ajit Jogi grabbed the leadership role and reached the Raj Bhawan with a hundred or so of his supporters and made the demand of the dissolution of Raman Singh’s government and imposition of President’s rule. This line was in opposition to what Manmohan Singh, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and others were deliberating at that time in Delhi. This sent confusing signals to the party workers across the state and opened the floodgates of similar demands and created an awkward situation for the party. By the next day the PM and the Congress president arrived and stated the party’s official stand of cooperation and help from the Centre to the state government in its fight against the Maoists. But the party failed to make the irrepressible Jogi fall in line. Jogi has, perhaps inadvertently, provided the opening to the beleaguered BJP to divert the needle of suspicion from itself to Jogi and through him to his party. Jogi had returned in a helicopter after attending the Sukma public meeting leaving the others to carry on in the motorcade which was attacked some distance away. Another Congressman almost accused by the BJP to be a party to the “conspiracy” is Kawasi Lakhma – the MLA who was let off by the Maoists. In the camp politics of the Congress Lakhma is considered close to Jogi. Meanwhile, the Congress has decided to show signs of defiance and is planning to re-start its Parivartan Yatra from the site of the ambush where it had come to an abrupt halt on 25 May. The yatra would be renamed either Shraddhanjali Yatra or Sadbhavna Yatra.