There was quite a sensation when the daily prominently carried a story saying that Dalits were treated as pariahs in Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan's ancestral village Jait in the Sehore district, neighbouring Bhopal. The village is not even 50 kms away from the Capital. It is dominated by the caste to which the Chief Minister belongs and a number of his family members, including his father, live in the village.

The newspaper titled the story “Apartheid in Chief Minister's village”. Immediately after the publication of the story, the Government's Public Relations department came out with a stout denial. However, the sham did not last long. For when the state Congress chief Mr. Suresh Pachauri visited the village the same day, the Dalits corroborated the story. Mr. Pachauri collected the village Dalits, escorted them to the temple and ensured their entry into the God's abode. The village was soon swarming with TV crews and quite a number of the Dalit residents insisted before cameras that the Temples and public wells and ponds were out-of-bounds for them. “If this is the situation in the Chief Minister's village, so close to Bhopal, the fate of the Dalits inhabiting far-off villages in the back of the beyond in the state can only be imagined”, said a memorandum submitted by a clutch of organizations to the State Human Rights Commission. The Commission chairperson promised a thorough enquiry into the matter.

Of course, the Chief Minister kept mum on the issue but it was clear that he had been embarrassed to no end. Especially so because the state government had convened a special session of the Assembly from May 11 to enable the Chief Minister to make a presentation of his grand plan to usher in a “Golden era” in the state. The “Swarnim Madhya Pradesh” (Golden Madhya Pradesh) scheme was touted to be something that would propel the state on the fast-track path to growth and prosperity. No matter if the event had lost much of its glitter owing to the President Ms. Pratibha Devi Singh Patil declining to open the special four-day-long session and the Congress and the BSP deciding to boycott it. The Congress was miffed that the agenda for the session contained a sole item: discussion on the “Swarnim MP” plan. It insisted that it would like to discuss the cases of the corrupt Ministers and top bureaucrats that had come to light recently. However, the government was sure that it wanted nothing except the grandiose plans to turn MP into a heaven to be discussed in the House.

Yet another embarrassment was in store for the Government. A story titled, “The dying heart of India”, exposed the sordid condition of the state's children. The report said, “With more hungry kids than anywhere else in the country, MP shows how the social security system can collapse if the delivery mechanism is rotten”.

The report on child malnutrition in MP painted a pathetic picture of the state of affairs. “MP has a bleak record; India's worst, comparable to Ethiopia and Chad. Within the country, it is ranked below Bihar and Jharkhand. More than half a million children below five died in MP in the last five years. At 60 percent, the state has India's highest proportion of malnourished children. It also has the highest infant mortality rate in the country (70 per 1000 births) and for tribals, it is 97 per 1000, according to National Family Health survey III.”, it said.

Coming, as they did, in the wake of raids on top bureaucrats' houses revealing crores in cash and a Court ordering an enquiry by the Lokayukta on the charges of corruption against senior Cabinet Minister Kailash Vijaygariya, the stories about dying children and the discriminated-against Dalits left quite a few red faces in the BJP as well as the Government.

In what is alleged to be a diversionary tactic, the newly-anointed state BJP Chief Mr. Prabhat Jha has announced that the BJP would be launching a state-wide agitation against the “UPA using CBI as a tool to serve its political ends”. Whether the protest serves its intended purpose, however, is anybody's guess.(IPA)