Siding with farmers protesting the center’s new agricultural laws Meghalaya’s governor Satya Pal Malik, who is speaking in Baghpat, UP on March 14, 2021, urged Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah not to offend them. Speaking at an event in his home district, he said that if the center gives the legal guarantee of the minimum support price for the crops, the farmers will relent.
Satya Pal Malik said that he will make sure they call off the protest. There are two aspects of what Mr. Satya Pal Malik has said first is about his own personality because he’s known to make controversial statements. He’s an outspoken governor, and he was first appointed governor of Bihar and then shifted to Jammu & Kashmir.
Malik was heading the state at that time when article 370 was abolished, and he used to make controversial statements back then also. After that, he was shifted to Goa and now he has been given charge up Meghalaya. So he has traveled a lot in the past four years and has made a lot of controversial statements and he himself has said on many occasions that he is known to make such kind of statements and it takes three to four days to give clarifications on his own statements.
This is the first aspect of what he has said. And the second aspect is, of course, the ground feedback that the BJP has been getting from the western UP, which is a Jat majority base area where the BJP had done remarkably well in the past three elections.
However, this time, the ground feedback with the BJP leaders is getting that Jats, in particular, are agitated, what has happened at the Ghazipur border when Rakesh Tikait was threatened to be getting arrested and now Mr. Malik himself intervened that Mr. Tikait should not be arrested.
So it actually demonstrates that how difficult the situation has become. As for the BJP as far as the western UP is concerned, Satya Pal Malik is the second senior Jat leader of the BJP, who is now making such a statement against these farm laws. So of course the BJP will be having a tough time in dealing with this kind of situation.
