With an eye on Scheduled Caste (SC) votes — which comprise 16-17% of the electorate in Madhya Pradesh, wielding influence in 35 reserved seats and even beyond — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the State is set to launch the ‘Sant Ravidas Samarasta Yatra’.
The yatra will start from five different points — Balaghat, Singrauli, Dhar, Sheopur, and Neemuch — and cover nearly 50 districts before culminating in Sagar district on August 12, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lay the foundation stone for the ₹100 crore Sant Ravidas temple in honour of the Bhakti-era saint revered by SC communities.
On July 25, Cabinet Minister Bhupendra Singh flagged off the yatra from Balaghat, while Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar launched from Sheopur, BJP’s national general secretary Kailsh Vijayvargiya from Dhar, and the national head of ST/SC cell of the BJP Lal Singh Arya from Neemuch flagged off the other yatras. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was slated to flag off the yatra originating in Singrauli but this launch event was rescheduled following a glitch in the helicopter.
During the course of the yatra, participants will collect soil from 55,000 villages of the State, which will be used in the construction of the grand temple. The party had earlier launched a similar initiative — the Veerangana Rani Durgawati Gaurav Yatras, named after the Gond queen Rani Durgawati — to woo tribal communities.
With Assembly elections due in three months from now, the BJP is making an attempt to boost its presence in the tribal- and SC-dominated pockets of Madhya Pradesh. Of the latter, concentrated mostly in regions such as Bundelkhand, Gwalior-Chambal, and Vindhya, the party hopes to improve its tally from the 2018 Assembly election, when it won only half (18) of the 35 reserved seats.
The opposition Congress, too, is making a bid to consolidate maximum support in these regions. The party’s national president Mallikarjun Kharge is visiting Sagar on August 13, a day after the bhoomi pujan of the temple is performed.
The yatra, and Mr. Kharge’s visit, are taking place in the backdrop of an incident in Chhatarpur, in which a Dalit man’s face and body were allegedly smeared with human excreta by a fellow villager.
Ahead of his visit on July 24, Mr. Kharge accused the BJP government of committing atrocities against Dalits, and that they had been facing humiliation under its rule for decades. The ruling party hit back by asking the Congress to check its own record when it came to atrocities against Dalits.
Mr. Kharge is expected to raise the issue again at the public rally planned for his forthcoming visit.
