Nautch girls catch Cong on the wrong foot
Shahira Naim
Tribune News Service
Lucknow, April 20
A booklet and a group of nautch girls have forced Congress leaders in
the state to look for cover. The two have unwittingly provided Bahujan
Samaj Party, smarting after the rousing Congress rally at Ambedkar
Nagar last week, an opportunity to get even.
The eight-page booklet was distributed on April 14 when Rahul Gandhi
flagged off ten 'Chetna Yatras', ostensibly to mobilise the masses and
Congress workers. The venue and the date were carefully chosen as it
was not only the birth anniversary of Baba Bhim Rao Ambedkar but also
the constituency which had elected Mayawati thrice to the Lok Sabha.
But while Rahul Gandhi stole the show last week, the BSP has now hit
back and pointed out that the eight-page booklet released on the
occasion does not make any mention of Dr Ambedkar.
"This is precisely what the Chief Minister Ms Mayawati meant when she
said that Congress had always ignored Dr Ambedkar and other dalit
leaders. Why, the booklet does not mention even Jagjivan Ram, the
other dalit icon of the Congress," says BSP state president Swami
Prasad Maurya.
The booklet devotes four lines to Lal Bahadur Shashtri and eight lines
to Dr Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister. But it has given one and a
half pages to Mahatma Gandhi, one and a half pages to Indira Gandhi
and Rajiv Gandhi besides one and a half pages more to Sonia Gandhi and
the Congress in the 21st century.
Party leaders are also squirming at reports that at another rally in
Bulandshahr on Sunday, to remind people of the 'glorious' 125 years of
the Congress, people were given a lesson in anatomy rather than
history.
The assembled gathering was entertained for over three hours not by
patriotic numbers but by nautch girls gyrating to raunchy numbers with
cutouts of a host of Congress leaders providing the backdrop. By the
time AICC General Secretary Pervez Hashmi and Mathura MLA Pradeep
Mathur arrived on the scene, three hours behind schedule, most of the
people had apparently left after the entertainment programme.
Congress leaders, red in the face, spluttered that an inquiry had been
ordered into the Bulandshahr incident. As for the booklet, the
omissions, though glaring, were 'unintentional', said the UP Congress
spokesperson Subodh Srivastava.
They had glossed over the absence of any photograph of Dr Ambedkar in
Congress posters by claiming that they were not 'official'. But in the
mine-field of UP politics, posters, a booklet and even nautch girls
threaten to upset political calculations.
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