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Lok Sabha elections 2019: Hand pump is hero in Sunny Deol roadshow
Sunny Deol, the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidate from Punjab’s Gurdaspur, was in the city to campaign for the party’s South Delhi candidate Ramesh Bidhuri.
On Thursday evening, the road outside the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) office in south Delhi’s Ghitorni was swarming with people. The men, both young and the elderly, had occupied the main road and the pavement. The women had taken over the divider. They were all there to get a glimpse of Hindi film actor Sunny Deol.
Deol, the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidate from Punjab’s Gurdaspur, was in the city to campaign for the party’s South Delhi candidate Ramesh Bidhuri.
As the crowd looked on, Deol and Bidhuri acknowledged through the sun roof of an SUV. Throughout the roadshow, which started from Ghitorni around 6.30 pm and covered several neighbourhoods in the Chhatarpur and Mehrauli assembly constituencies, both Deol and Bidhuri did not speak.
While Deol mostly waved at people, taking occasional breaks, Bidhuri, for the most of the one-hour roadshow, waved a dummy hand pump.
As the roadshow began, a group of Chhatarpur residents gifted a dummy hand pump, coloured in saffron and green to match with the theme of the BJP flag, to Deol, who handed it over to Bidhuri.
The sitting MP, Bidhuri waved the hand pump intermittently at the stopovers.
“The hand pump signifies two things. Remember Gadar [Ek Prem Katha], the movie in which Sunny sir had pulled out a real hand pump? That is what the BJP has done to corruption,” said Mahesh Tanwar, a BJP supporters who brought the hand pump.
“There is also a massive water supply problem in this area. The hand pump resembles end of the water shortage issue too,” he said.
Standing beside Tanwar, an elderly man was trying hard to connect bamboo sticks to form a 100 feet tall BJP flag. His reason, the roadshow was about to start from the 100 “Futta” (feet) road in Ghitorni and so the flag should be of an equivalent height. Other BJP supporters convinced him to make four 25 feet tall flags instead. “A 100 feet flag would be unmanageable. Even the 25 feet ones would be tough, but we will manage,” Tanwar said.
As the roadshow moved ahead, the BJP supporters played songs from Sunny Deol movies, including Gadar Ek Prem Katha and Border, in loudspeakers atop a mini truck. When they ran out of songs, they started to play a mashup of Deol’s popular movie dialogues – the most repeated of them being the “Taarikh Pe Taarikh” line staged in a courtroom in the movie Damini released in 1993. The gaps between the dialogues were filled by quick slogans such as “Jai Sri Ram” and “Har Har Mahadev”.
With time, the crowd swelled. And by the time the roadshow ended in Mehrauli, the numbers had crossed 3,000.
As the entourage went ahead, it left behind several two-wheelers falling on the road -- some had their seats ripped out, some had their headlights broken. They were casualties of a stampede-like situation in the stopover points. Security was stepped up and more police officials from local stations were roped in.
