The rally organized by Aam Admi Party near Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on April 22 and Bharatiya Janata Party’s October 27, 2013 Hunkar rally in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan have at least one similarity––though otherwise there are lot of dissimilarities.

In both the rallies human lives were lost but in a very different way. On October 27 about half a dozen blasts took place in and around Gandhi Maidan during Narendra Modi’s rally. About half a dozen people lost their lives and more than 80 sustained injuries, but the show continued peacefully. In fact one explosion took place a couple of hours before at the Patna railway station, yet the organizers handled the situation well without calling it off.

Announcements were made from the podium urging the crowd not to burst crackers. The BJP leaders were aware that they were actually bomb blasts and not crackers, but they tried to distract the attention of the masses and reduced panic.Those who died or sustained injuries were rushed to the hospital. More than the district administration it is the crowd which rose to the occasion.

The rally continued even though the electronic media started flashing the news of the blasts. The credit goes to the Bharatiya Janata Party that its cadres did not fan any emotion, instead they behaved maturely. After the rally there was no debate whether it should have continued or not.The AAP rally was organized basically against the Narendra Modi’s land acquisition policy. After the Congress, the AAP thought to exploit the sentiment of farmers. The recent hailstorms and the failure of the government had already alienated a large section of farmers across the country.

But something somewhere went horribly wrong. A farmer from Rajasthan, Gajendra Singh, climbed up the tree not far away from the stage to hang himself as Kumr Vishwas was speaking. Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal claims that he made repeated appeal to the policemen to rush, but they did not react. It
was left to the AAP volunteers to bring him down and rush him to hospital. Later he died.The rally contined with Arvind Kejriwal’s anti-Narendra Modi diatribe.

May be Kejriwal’s accuation against the police’s apathy is right. But the police failed in Patna on October 27 too. So it is futile to expect too much from them. The moot question is: how the people on the dais responded? Certainly the media was aggressive as it was a suicide committed just a few blocks from country’s Parliament and not serial blasts in Bihar’s capital.

Whether AAP should have continued with its rally or not is a big moral question. Some of its leaders are now pointing towards the Hunkar rally to justify their decision to continue the rally.Some AAP apologists are of the view that the crowd would have turned into mob had they abruptly cancelled it. They might have turned violent.

They are arguing on different channels that a section of media and the BJP are trying to distract the attention from the real issue of farmers’ plight in general, though it is also true that Gajendra’s suicide is tragic.

While the Hunkar rally blasts largely helped the BJP come to power, Gajendra committed suicide just a couple of months after AAP came to power. Politically, Kejriwal seems to be safe.