In Gujarat civic bodies crisis rerun, BJP factions slug it out in Chalala

Even as the BJP-led Gujarat government is yet to take a call on the Chalala body crisis, the municipality’s functioning has come to a standstill in the absence of the political executive. The ruling party was left red-faced after a group of its Chalala councillors rose in rebellion and defeated the budget presented by municipality president Geeta Kariya on April 19, even though the Opposition Congress voted for the budget.

🚨 Limited Time Offer | Express Premium with ad-lite for just Rs 2/ day 👉🏽 Click here to subscribe 🚨

“We will not allow the budget to be approved at any cost,” a rebel leader of the Amreli BJP told . “While efforts are on for a truce, we cannot cede everything to the rival group.”

On the other hand, the official BJP group is hopeful that the party leadership will intervene to prop up Kariya. “We have not lost hope. We are hoping that Kaushik Vekariya, BJP’s Amreli unit president, will make another attempt to quell the intra-party rebellion and we will be able to convene one more budget meeting for Chalala municipality shortly,” a local BJP functionary said.

A similar situation was witnessed in Devbhumi Dwarka district’s Bhanvad municipality last year, which lad led to the state government superceding the civic body’s general board. However, in the ensuing mid-term polls there, the BJP faced a drubbing.

In Morbi district’s Wankaner municipality early last year, a group of BJP rebels, with the support of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) councillors, defeated the party’s official nominees in the elections to the president’s and the vice-president’s posts and seized control of the civic body.

The discontent in the saffron party camp in Chalala erupted in 2020 when the BJP leadership nominated Kariya as the municipality head. A group of eight rebel councillors, including a few who had defected to the BJP from the Congress, opposed her nomination. Due to their rebellion, Kariya failed to convene the municipality’s general board meeting to consider and pass the budget despite the BJP having 20 of the total 24 councillors.

The BJP rebels are split in two camps — the Kariya group affiliated to ex-Amreli party chief Bharat Kanabar and the faction affiliated to JV Kakadiya, the local BJP MLA, who had won Dhari seat in the 2017 elections as a Congress candidate but defected to the BJP in 2020 and won the consequent bypoll on the BJP ticket. Kakadiya thus gave the BJP a toe hold in Amreli, having lost its all five seats to the Congress in the 2017 polls.

After the Chalala civic body failed to pass its 1.19 crore budget, the municipality chief officer informed the councillors on March 31 that they no longer held any financial powers.

Section 76 of the Gujarat Municipalities Act makes it incumbent upon the ruling party to pass the budget latest by March 31. The BJP government’s urban development department has however still not made its intervention, which is in sharp contrast to its prompt action in a similar case of the Congress-ruled Gondal taluka panchayat in 2016.

The Congress had wrested the Gondal panchayat from the BJP in the November 2015 polls amid the Patidar quota stir, by winning 12 of the total 22 seats. However, one of its Congress members defected to the BJP following which the ruling party failed to pass its budget. The state government then quickly appointed an administrator for the taluka panchayat before eventually superseding it on June 20, 2016. In the subsequent midterm election, the BJP emerged victorious.

The Bhavnagar municipalities regional commissioner, Ajay Dahiya, said, “The chief officer of Chalala municipality had sent us a report the day the budget could not be passed. We had forwarded the same to the state government and we are waiting for guidance from the government in the matter,” adding, “The Gujarat Municipalities Act does not provide for any timeline for superseding a civic body on account of failing to pass the budget”.

The state government had also chosen a different course of action over the crisis that hit the Bhanvad municipality, where the BJP rebels had sided with the Congress members to pass a no-confidence motion against the then incumbent president and vice-president in March last year. Instead of convening a general board meeting for electing new president and vice-president, the district collector appointed a councillor from the official BJP group, Bhanu Rajani, as the acting president. After Rajani contracted Covid-19, she was replaced by another BJP loyalist Jyotsana Sagathiya. Eventually, the municipality was superseded by the state government on June 16, two-and-a-half months after the BJP lost power there. In the midterm election held in October, the Congress won 16 of the total 24 seats and ended the BJP’s 25-year-old reign in Bhanvad.

Meanwhile, the Opposition has been stepping up its demand that the Chalala municipality be superseded by the government. “The civic body has been rudderless for the past few months even as the residents of the town are complaining about the poor quality of drinking water. We have requested the regional commissioner of municipalities in Bhavnagar to supersede Chalala municipality,” Chapraj Dhadhal, the Opposition leader from the Congress said.

It is a different matter that the BJP dispensation is treading cautiously on the issue in the run-up to the Assembly polls due by this year-end, given the fact that it had won the Dhari constituency only once before Kakadiya’s victory.