NEW DELHI: With the farmers’ unions shunning all overtures of the government to resume talks and the Opposition throwing weight behind agitation against the contentious farm laws, the top leadership of the BJP on Tuesday went into a huddle with party leaders from western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana Punjab and Rajasthan to brainstorm over ways for the political damage control.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, BJP chief JP Nadda held a meeting with several BJP MPs and MLAs from the four states where the saffron outfit is sensing imminent political damage on the account of the unabated farm protest.
While the government and the BJP hadn’t yet banked on party’s influential leaders from the nerve centres of the farm agitation, the saffron outfit called party’s key Jat leaders from western UP and Haryana, besides others from Punjab and Rajasthan for strategising over the next course of actions
BJP MPs Sanjeev Balyan and Satyapal Singh, who had defeated the RLD, also attended the meeting on Tuesday with the top leadership of the party.
The government had held multiple rounds of talks with the farm union leaders until the breakdown of the negotiations ahead of the January 26 tractor rally. Simultaneously, the Haryana and UP units of the party had also mobilised a few farmers’ representations in support of the laws.
However, the groundswell of the support for the agitating farmers in western UP, which the BJP had swept in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, threatens to change the political equations ahead of the next year’s state Assembly elections.
High commission writes open letter after UK MP tweet
The Indian High Commission in London has written an open letter to UK MP Claudia Webbe over her support for the farmers’ protest, saying she was welcome to convey apprehensions of her community to the High Commission. “We would have been able to comprehensively and in detail provide clarifications to assuage the concerns of your constituents with regard to the recent path-breaking Indian Farm Laws against which a small section of India’s farming community has been protesting,” the High Commission wrote.