Battle for Bastar: tribal legislator threatens to dislodge BJP

By Sujeet Kumar

Jagdalpur (Chhattisgarh), May 7, 2011 (IANS) A tribal politician who has never attended school and can neither read nor write is making Chhattisgarh's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) struggle to retain its "safe" Bastar Lok Sabha seat in the state's Maoist stronghold.

With just a day to go for the Bastar by-election Sunday, the Congress is hopeful that Kawasi Lakhma, the 55-year-old Gond tribal who has won the Konta assembly seat in the region thrice, will dislodge the BJP that has been representing Bastar in the Lok Sabha for four terms - and with huge margins.

The BJP has been dominating Bastar, tagged as one of the most violence-prone Lok Sabha constituency, for a while. It has not only been winning the Lok Sabha seat but also holds seven of the eight assembly seats from the sprawling constituency. The eighth has been held by Lakhma, who won it the first time in 1998, then in 2003 and then in 2008.

Now, the BJP admits, that easy ride to power has become a political obstacle course in a region few politicians dare to campaign in.

"No doubt, Lakhma has given us sleepless nights. We were expecting an easy ride till last week but now it's a toss-up between the BJP and the Congress," said a senior BJP leader.

"All credit goes to Lakhma, whose appeal 'give me a chance' is making a deep impression on voters across all the eight assembly segments, mainly in vast forested areas. Most leaders of all parties stayed away from campaigning because of fear of Maoists," the leader, who is coordinating the party campaign, admitted.

Based in Jagdalpur, headquarters of the Bastar region, about 300 km south of capital Raipur, the BJP leader said the Congress nominee, always in a dhoti and kurta, had seriously threatened the party's poll prospects.

"The discouraging inputs from interiors about the mood of the voters had forced the BJP to put all efforts and resources to save the tribal reserved Bastar seat, which the party has not lost since 1998."

While BJP leaders fret and fume, Lakhma is remarkably sanguine, even detached.

"I am not much bothered about victory or loss. The party instructed me to challenge the BJP at its stronghold and I am happy to mess up the battle despite the fact that I don't have the same back-up of funds and resources as the BJP," Lakhma told IANS.

"The good thing for me is all Congress factions got united in the battle for Bastar. If I manage to produce an upset here, it will be the perfect beginning for the end of the BJP regime under which poor tribals of Bastar have suffered a lot," Lakhma said, referring to the rise in civilian killings and people moving out of their ancestral villages after December 2003 when the BJP came to power.

The by-election has been necessitated by the death of BJP MP Baliram Kashyap in March. He had been winning the seat for the BJP for the last four elections and the party has now fielded his son Dinesh Kashyap in a bid to cash in on his popularity.

There are eight candidates in the fray for the seat that has 1,716 polling booths in four districts - Dantewada, Bijapur, Bastar and Narayanpur.

The Election Commission has relocated 200 polling booths from Maoist-commanded forest interiors to areas close to police stations and paramilitary camps as the roads in deep interiors are loaded with multiple-layer landmines for years.

(Sujeet Kumar can be contacted at sujeet.k@ians.in)