Shyama politics

The Congress party rules the municipal corporation of Raipur, Chhattisgarh’s capital, and the Bharatiya Janata Party rules the state. That creates the ground conditions for several controversies, including naming a park. A new park in the state capital was named after Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, founder member of Jan Sangh.

Then the municipal corporation changed the commemoration to Shyama Charan Shukla, a one-time Congress heavyweight from central India. Congress municipal leaders point out that there’s no problem since the park is named after “Shyama”, no matter that the middle and last names differ.

But junior corporation officials have had to pay the price for this political name game. The municipal commissioner has issued show-cause notices to three junior officials asking them to explain how the name was changed when the state government had issued a notification naming the park after the Jan Sangh founder.