New Delhi, Feb. 25: Nitin Gadkari, the road transport and highways minister, has been fielded by Narendra Modi to defend the amended land acquisition bill.
Before Parliament sat this morning, the Prime Minister met his “core” ministerial group, which includes Arun Jaitley, Rajnath Singh and Sushma Swaraj apart from Gadkari, and deliberated on the “negative” perceptions emanating from the campaign against the bill inside Parliament and on the streets.
Modi asked Gadkari to address a news conference today, picking him because he had been rural development minister briefly and was familiar with the land acquisition law.
In June last year, a month after the Modi government took charge, Gadkari had convened a meeting of chief ministers and state revenue ministers to get a status report on the UPA-enacted land law.
But sources said Gadkari was chosen for another reason. “He is on the same page as the Prime Minister and (finance minister) Jaitley on the amendments to the land law,” a source said.
#Although Rajnath was tasked with negotiating with the RSS farmers’ wing and other peasant groups, sources said the home minister’s “pro-reforms” credentials were not “100 per cent established”.
“Therefore, he was perhaps not thought of as the best candidate to open the government’s innings. Rajnathji likes to think of himself as a kisan neta (farmers’ leader) before anything else,” a source said.
Rural development minister Chaudhary Birender Singh should have been the “logical” choice but the BJP leadership believes that, like Rajnath, his “heart too is not fully with” the amended law.
At his news conference, Gadkari projected himself as a farmer leader. “Narendrabhai, (former Karnataka chief minister) Yeddyurappa and I were always identified as pro-farmer leaders in our party,” claimed the minister whose own website describes him as a “successful entrepreneur who used urban resources for creating employment opportunities in rural areas”.
Born and raised in Nagpur, Gadkari had started his political career as a student activist of the Sangh’s Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
Gadkari claimed that the Congress chief ministers who spoke at the June 2014 conference had taken a stand different from their party’s. Then Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan had written that he was “unhappy” with the six-fold rise in relief and rehabilitation costs that the UPA-enacted land law would foist on states, the BJP minister claimed.
Gadkari also said Haryana’s new chief minister, Manohar Lal Khattar of the BJP, had increased the compensation package for farmers four-fold over what his predecessor, Bhupinder Singh Hooda of the Congress, had paid for land acquisitions.# Claiming that Modi had told him this morning there was “no question of meting out injustice” to farmers, Gadkari based his defence on a note Jaitley had prepared in January after the Centre promulgated the land ordinance.
Jaitley’s principal contention was that by exempting some sectors from social impact assessment and prior consent of landowners, rural India would “benefit”.
“Almost all the exempted purposes would enhance the value of land, create employment and provide rural areas with better (physical) infrastructure and social infrastructure,” Jaitley’s note said.
The operative lines were: “Development and justice to the landowner must coexist. One cannot be done at the cost of the other.”
On its Twitter page, the BJP decoded the jargon. It claimed land-owners would get four times the market price of their plots, besides facilities like colleges, hospitals, roads and railways so that an ailing farmer does not have to travel to a faraway hospital or his son journey “200km” a day to and from college.
BJP sources said no all-party meeting was planned but ministers would speak to leaders of other parties. Today, Jaitley reached out to ally Akali Dal. Sources said a senior leader would get in touch with another unhappy ally, the Shiv Sena.
via NorthEast Calling http://ift.tt/1ERAMXk
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