UP professionals launch party

Sick of vote bank politics, corruption and the general failure of the established political parties, a large number of young professionals, well-established in their professions, have joined hands to establish a new political party Bharat Punarnirmaan Dal (BPD).

They are going to contest about 25 seats in the UP Vidhan Sabha elections, including two each in Kanpur and Lucknow. These are not for winning the election but to propagate their ideas. The party was registered in UP on March 6 and will shortly get its all-India registration.

Most of the leading members, or the starting group, consist of professionals and lawyers who have been doing social work for the last few years.

Some like P N Shukla, a cancer specialist, were active in the 'Youth for Equality' movement, which spearheaded the stir against the granting of reservations to OBCs in institutions of higher learning; others like Ajai Shukla, the president of the party, is a mechanical engineer from IIT Bombay.

He has worked in slums of Bombay and in other areas of Maharashtra; Omendra Kumar did graduation in electronics and communication engineering and got his master's degree in material sciences; Ravi Shanker too is an engineer from IIT Kanpur, and was part of the student group which taught in villages.

He has formed a youth organisation in 27 districts of the state. Business Standard talked to a cross-section of the leaders. They will hold their first public meeting on April 1 to explain their manifesto. They are firmly for large dams and are strong advocates of interlinking rivers of the south and the north.

They are concerned at the decline in the small scale industry, citing the example of Aligarh locks, which they say have been swamped by the Chinese. However, they appreciate the midday meal schemes and the golden quadrangle.

They are neither for the left or right and their ideology is that of nationalism. Asked why they are getting into the uncertainity of the political world, they quote Vivekananda "Uttishthatta Jagrat: utho aur jaago (Nobody is going to do it for us, we shall have to do it ourselves)."