Nagpur: Out of the 11 special trains sponsored by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to ferry its workers to Mumbai from Vidarbha for the party’s grand 38th foundation day celebration rally, at least two reached so late that workers missed the main speech of party president Amit Shah.
Hundreds of partymen, mainly from Nagpur rural, complained that the train travel took 24 hours as it was routed through a long route of Jalgaon-Surat to Mumbai. “We reached too late after all the trouble and exhausting journey that there was no point even going to rally venue at Bandra Kurla Complex. I had a harrowing time arranging food and water for the 16 workers I took along,” said Mohan Pande of Katol.
Overzealousness of the party in arranging 28 trains from across different parts of the state, besides hundreds of buses and cars, proved to be logistics disaster. The 11 trains from Vidarbha booked through IRCTC had preferred Bandra on Western Railway as destination and hence routed through Jalgaon-Surat to Mumbai. But partymen who slept in the overnight train were aghast when they woke up and found the train in Surat around 8.30am.
Obviously, the unusually heavy traffic on the route caused by influx of special BJP trains disturbed the departure schedules. “Except for couple of trains, other 26 trains from all over the state arrived as per schedule,” Sunil Udasi, chief PRO of Central Railway, told TOI. He said 17 trains were booked on the Central Railway and the rest on Western Railway and there was no deviation from the agreed path, he said.
Another special train that left Nagpur on Thursday afternoon, reached Mumbai around 1pm and workers got off to rush to BKC and barely managed to reach in time to hear Shah’s speech. “Except for the delayed arrival of a few trains, there was no problem and most of the partymen reached the venue when the function was on,” said Dr Upendra Kothekar, Vidarbha convenor of BJP adding in such a big operation of ferrying large crowds such hiccups are no surprise. Dr Kothekar claimed a record crowd of around 3 lakh attended the celebration.
Meanwhile, Katol BJP MLA Ashish Deshmukh skipped the Mumbai event. He preferred to rush to his constituency to console a bereaved family. The first-time MLA is sulking these days and may quit the party anytime to switch over to the Congress.
Political observers are seeing the show of strength organized by the BJP as a desperate bid to boost morale of party workers who are losing hope after recent electoral defeats in by-elections in Rajasthan, MP and Uttar Pradesh where two prime seats of Gorakhpur and Phulpur were lost recently. The Shah talk was to charge up the workers for the Lok Sabha elections early next year and also to give signal to the ally-cum-critic Shiv Sena in its den that BJP could go it alone.
Logistical blunder
