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Chandrakant Shukla
Sitting in the country’s capital Delhi, political pundits kept announcing the victory of Congress in the national media without coming to Chhattisgarh for a single day. Even the so-called big journalists of the state capital Raipur left no stone unturned in declaring Congress’s lead without trying to know the real situation of the state. Perhaps Congress accepted the indications of these political pundits as true. Was the government not aware of the truth of the Kawardha incident? Why was the Biranpur incident taken so lightly? Was the anger arising over the issue of conversion in entire Bastar including Narayanpur not reaching the capital?
In the last 33 years, I have had the opportunity to do regional journalism for most of the time. From this perspective, I could clearly see the heat of the Kawardha incident scorching the entire state. The Biranpur incident had further intensified that flame. In this era of social media, even the incident from remote Narayanpur of the state reaches every corner of the state within minutes. The general public is no longer dependent on whitewashed news published in the capital’s newspapers. The city residents who endured the ‘orgy’ of ‘administrative terror’ after the Kawardha incident… were not just celebrating Vijay Sharma’s victory on the evening of 3 December, watching the video of the celebration it seems as if they are now somehow That one has got the freedom to breathe in the ‘open air’. I have never seen or heard such celebration just on the victory of any candidate.
Thousands of people kept dancing for hours on Vijay Sharma’s victory in Kawardha.
After the Kawardha incident, the way big religious events started taking place in the state, how lakhs of people started gathering to listen to the words of the saints. The messages given by the saints in these religious events… would the people of the state have forgotten by the time of elections only the promises of loan waiver and free electricity… this free… that free. No…no sir..! The people of the state remembered everything. I also do not believe that the government officials were unaware of the strong wind of Hindutva blowing. Information must have been reaching them regularly, but the warlords, entangled in the ‘illusion of Maya’, do not go up and tell bitter things. Even if such things have reached us after filtering from somewhere, then where do the people ‘above’ accept the mistakes in their decisions.
This political game going on in Chhattisgarh had reached every corner of the state a year ago. Dr. Raman Singh, who was the head of the state for 15 years, understood this suppressed spark very well. The news of getting tickets to Vijay Sharma, the biggest victim of the Kawardha incident, and Ishwar Sahu, who lost his son in the Biranpur incident, gave vent to that suppressed spark. What happened next… This was the same spark which took the form of flame and set the EVM machines on fire on 7th and 17th November.
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