ANTIQUES SHOPS

There is no telling what a bumper harvest of wheat crop can do. In Madhya Pradesh, a bountiful rabi season led to an unpredictable roller coaster ride for the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government from which it has just got off, mostly smiling.

Riding on the increased yields, Madhya Pradesh has not only met its procurement target of 6.5 million metric tonnes, but is also going to overshoot it by two million tonnes.

The State's procurement figures, at the time of writing this report, stands at 8.4 million tonnes and officials from the State Food and Civil Supplies Department are confident of the final figure being 8.6 million tonnes.

Jute bag shortage leads to unrest

The government has reasons to be doubly happy because a series of events at the end of April and May threatened a different outcome, casting a shadow on its well publicised high-tech wheat procurement process.

As it turned out, cooperative societies equipped with laptops, dedicated procurement software, data-bikers and an SMS-based farmer intimation system, stood humbled by a shortage of jute bags for packing the produce.

Farmers across the State were finding it difficult to sell their massively successful, “exceeding-all-expectations” wheat harvest.

The crisis reached its peak when two farmers committed suicide. Police firing on agitating farmers under the banner of the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), and resulting in the death of one person, only worsened the situation.

The government blamed the Centre for not providing enough jute bags, saying it had received 1.73 lakh bales of jute bags as against its requirement of 3.18 lakh bales.

The response of the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, K.V. Thomas, was that the State had failed to present a “realistic demand of its requirement of gunny bags when the Centre was assessing jute bag requirements of States.”

In a belated move, the State government ordered high density polyethylene bags, which eventually doused the fires. Why it did not do this earlier remains a mystery.

But it was not just the Centre's “discriminatory policies” — a term Mr. Chouhan uses liberally — that were giving the BJP-led Madhya Pradesh government sleepless nights.

The BKS which was leading the State-wide farmers' agitations and constantly slamming the State government's “anti-farmer” policies is an affiliate of the party's parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS).

The most notable of these protests was in December 2010, when thousands of farmers from across the State camped in Bhopal laying siege to the Chief Minister's residence and disrupting life for two days.

On May 7, the 20th day of the agitation to demand speedy procurement of their produce, the BKS led 4,000 farmers from Raisen district to protest the shortage of jute bags, blaming the State government, and not the Centre, for the delay in procurement.

Shivkumar Sharma, the BKS' highly vocal and influential State president, who exhorted the farmers to assert their right to sell their successful wheat produce, was arrested along with 35 others following a clash between the agitators and the police. A farmer, Harisingh, died in police firing.

But just when it seemed that the government was losing control of the situation, it appears to have come out on top of it.

Other issues

The State BJP president, Prabhat Jha, held a press conference where he called Mr. Sharma, aka “Kakkaji,” a “blackmailer who was conspiring with the Congress (the leader of the Opposition in the State, Ajay Singh, describes him as a “selfless social worker”) and was getting back at the government because his application for a mining lease had been rejected.

Mr. Jha also claimed that the BKS leader wanted a Lok Sabha ticket from the BJP and was instigating farmers after this demand too was rejected.

Following this, the Sangh Parivar distanced itself from Mr. Sharma. The BKS removed him from the post of president, while he was still in jail.

With that threat taken care of, the rest of the procurement process went off smoothly, barring a few unimpressive attempts by the Congress to make an issue out of irregularities in procurement. The turnaround for the government came in less than a month.

But Mr. Chouhan's troubles are not yet over. On Thursday, the last day of procurement, the Centre alleged “foul play” in the State's procurement process.

A report in the Business Standard, quoting sources from the Food and Civil Supplies Ministry, claimed that the Centre suspected private players having purchased cheap wheat from the Public Distribution System (PDS) and selling it back to the official procurement system.

Yet, the BJP's victory over the BKS is a reflection of the influence the Chief Minister has come to wield within the party. This is no mean feat if one considers that the BKS recently had its way in neighbouring Gujarat, another BJP-ruled State, where it forced the government to halt multinational seed giant Mosanto's ambitious “Project Sunshine,” a hybrid-maize seed distribution project.

With elections to the Madhya Pradesh Assembly just a year away, neither the BJP's central leadership, nor the RSS can afford to antagonise Mr. Chouhan and the local leadership.

After all, they have won two straight election victories for the party following a decade of Congress rule under Digvijay Singh and look set to repeat the feat next year with the Congress proving to be a weak opposition.

Further, amid the factionalism and internal conflicts within the BJP that have come to the fore in Karnataka, Rajasthan and more recently, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh virtually stands alone as a shining example of the party's success.