Brahmins restive in MP

ND Sharma | Madhya Pradesh | 8 December 2008 |

The Brahmin is restless, at least in Madhya Pradesh. Mayawati’s social engineering has created stirrings in his bosom. He recalls nostalgically how he once dominated all aspects of social and political life in Bharatavarsha and to what a depraved state he has been reduced to in India. He has to dance to the tunes of an outcaste!

An incident, though a minor one, has not gone down particularly well with the Brahmins. A high-profile retired director-general of police (DGP) of Madhya Pradesh, a Brahmin, joined the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) some time back. When Mayawati came to Bhopal to address an election meeting, he climbed the dais and occupied one of the several chairs that were placed on both sides of the high-back chair kept for the BSP supremo. A BSP functionary saw it and promptly signalled to the former IPS officer to get down from the dais and sit in the audience.

The Brahmins would have to fight unitedly to regain their rightful place, the former DGP later told a Brahman Mahapanchayat, formed by 38 organisations of Brahmins, transcending party lines. Raghunandan Sharma, BJP member of Rajya Sabha, was made working president of the Mahapanchayat, probably in recognition of his long experience of fighting political battles. In fact, Sharma was among the first Brahmins in Madhya Pradesh to benefit from Mayawati’s social engineering. Sharma spelled out the objective of the Brahman Mahapanchayat when he said that the Brahmin was discharging his responsibilities in every field and he would one day decide the future of politics in the country.

After her impressive victory in Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, Mayawati turned her attention to Madhya Pradesh, where the Assembly elections were due in less than a year, and started implementation of her social engineering by sending Brahmin leaders from Uttar Pradesh to woo the Brahmins in Madhya Pradesh. Both the main parties, the BJP and the Congress, went into panic. The Brahmins stood relegated to the backseats in both the parties, more so in the Congress.

The Congress made Suresh Pachauri the PCC president with a view to appeasing the Brahmin community. It is after decades that the Madhya Pradesh Congress is being headed by a Brahmin. The BJP made a colossus compromise with its so-called principles by luring back into its fold Raghunandan Sharma who had joined Uma Bharati’s Bharatiya Jana Shakti after castigating the Shivraj Singh Chauhan government in the most stinking terms. In a series of letters spread over a considerable period, Sharma, then vice-president of the state BJP, had described the Chauhan government as being run by touts and power brokers. In one of the letters, he observed that “corruption is rampant in the government from top to the bottom” and that it was “so depressing to see how the money from the transport, mining and other departments is flowing into the party funds.” Sharma was not only re-admitted into the party but was also sent to Rajya Sabha in the by-elections.

Chauhan took another step to woo Brahmins by sanctioning Rs 11 crore for development of Janapav (in the Malwa region) where Parashuram, the legendary leader of the Brahmins, was said to have been born. For this he got himself felicitated by a little known organisation of Brahmins, prompting another organisation of Brahmins to point out that there was no evidence that Parashuram was born at Janapav.

Raghunandan Sharma often remarked that he was taken back into the BJP because of his being a Brahmin. He called upon all Brahmins to carry a shastra (weapon) along with the shaastra (book of knowledge) in order to subdue the Kshatriyas. (Parashuram, whom the Brahmins consider their leader, is described as having wiped out the Kshatriyas from the face of the earth 21 times; he is portrayed as an expert in both the shaastra and the use of shastra.)

The Brahmins are likely to be assertive in the Congress and the BJP in the days to come. It is going to create more problems in the Congress where the Thakurs had kept the Brahmins away from the organisation for quite some time.