Lucknow, March 12 :They have sensed the force of the tide and are decidedly afraid to swim against it.
The bulldozer politics in Uttar Pradesh has put the Samajwadi Party and the Congress in a Catch 22 situation.
In the 2022 assembly elections, the Samajwadi Party had used the bulldozer to hit back at the BJP in its election campaign and Akhilesh Yadav, in his every speech, projected the bulldozer as an example of the dictatorship of the BJP leadership.
SP leaders drew a parallel between the bulldozer and the excesses of the Emergency but the ploy did not work.
In fact, it boomeranged.
It hurt the Samajwadi Party the most. The voters, apparently, approved of the bulldozer politics.
Post-election, the Samajwadi leaders have almost stopped talking about the bulldozer and have reverted to the incidents of crime and the poor law and order situation to hit out at the Yogi Adityanath government.
A senior SP leader said, “The BJP knows the art of giving a communal overtone to all their illegal acts. They have turned the bulldozer into a symbol of Hindu pride that crushes non-Hindus. After the bulldozer, it is the encounters that are being used for the same purpose. Why are Hindus not the victims of bulldozer and police encounters? Is there not a single Hindu who has done wrong?”
He added, “Anyone who opposes it is immediately termed anti-Hindu. We have no option but to keep quiet till the people realise the truth.”
The Congress faces a similar predicament.
The state unit of the Congress that has almost become defunct, does not go beyond issuing press statements on bulldozer politics.
A senior party functionary says, “What can we do if our leaders have not defined a clear line on the issue. The party president is unconcerned about Uttar Pradesh while Rahul Gandhi does not want to touch the state even with a barge pole because his sister Priyanka is in charge and as for Priyanka, she has not stepped in here since the past one year. As a result, we have also stopped talking on such contentious issues.”
With opposition parties clearly wary of taking on the bulldozer, the bulldozer politics will undoubtedly gain strength in the coming months. (IANS)