Jat agitation does not mean well for India

Unprecedented violence... Mobs determined to teach Delhi a lesson... An incompetent chief minister... Losses of over Rs 200 billion.
Haryana's Jat agitation has a somber message for the nation. Rashme Sehgal reports.

IMAGE: Protesters set shops on fire as the Jat agitation demanding reservation intensified in Sonepat on Saturday, February 20, 2016. Photograph: PTI

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal's ineptness in handling the Jat agitation has taken a heavy toll.

The ferocity of the attack by the Jat community across Haryana has shaken the chief minister and his ministerial colleagues who were unable to gauge that the reservation issue would take such a violent turn.

Khattar had been assured by his Jat ministers that they were in dialogue with the protesters and would be able to contain the agitation. The CM made little effort to assess the situation on his own and this can be best gauged from the fact that when the flare-up took place, the CM, his ministers and most of his senior bureaucrats were in Chandigarh.

Says one Jat minister, speaking on condition that he would not be identified by name in this report, "From being an RSS pracharak, he was catapulted to the seat of chief minister. Thirty nine of the 47 BJP MLAs are first-timers and were equally at sea. That is why although the state has been boiling for eight days, the CM and his colleagues have taken no political initative to reach out to the Jat community."

Even after the agitators became extremely violent, Khattar did not issue orders to the police to use force and kept insisting they use tear gas to disperse the agitators.

Within hours, the violence had spread across the state engulfing most of its major cities including Sonepat, Rohtak, Jhajjar, Jind, Gurgaon, Hissar, Karnal, Faridabad and Bhiwani.

IMAGE: Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar: 'Although the state has been boiling for eight days, the CM and his colleagues have taken no political initative to reach out to the Jat community.'

"When we asked for 90 companies," says a senior police officer, "we were given three. Firing of tear gas shells or caning the agitators could hardly be expected to rein them in."

Khattar's problems may have been compounded by the fact the majority of the police force comprises Jats who are reported to have been unwilling to take action against members of their community.

Haryana has paid a heavy price with most of its large and small industrial units having faced a shut down. ASSOCHAM estimates the state has suffered losses of over Rs 20,000 crore (Rs 200 billion) due to the destruction of private and public property while the collateral damage to neighbouring Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab runs into several more thousand crores of rupees.

The Jats remain unrepentant about having held the state to ransom for over a week. An aggressive Yashpal Mallik, president of the All India Jat Reservation Agitation Committee, says, "BJP MP Raj Kumar Saini from Kurukshetra has been making the most inflammatory statements against the Jats for the last one year. He went to the extent of calling us 'sons of pigs.' Why was no attempt made to rein him in?"

The BJP's central leadership has served Saini a show cause notice, but this is a case of too little too late. Jat leaders believe Saini's inflammatory speeches were made at the behest of BJP President Amit Shah who they allege is trying to create a divide between the Jat and Other Backward Classes because the Jats have traditionally been non-BJP voters.

"The BJP has created an OBC brigade, which is a loose coalition of the backward classes to cut the Jats to size," Mallik insists.