<b>Aditi Phadnis:</b> The rise and rise of Vijay Sampla

Sampla's popularity comes from being a local boy who made good despite disadvantages

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi took oath in 2014, the biggest challenge before him was how to balance his council of ministers in terms of wisdom and government experience. Of the first there was no dearth. But there was a serious shortage of the second — because so many of his colleagues were not just first-time ministers but in some cases, even first-time members of Parliament!

One such was Vijay Sampla, who became minister of state for social empowerment. He contested the Lok Sabha election for the first time from Hoshiarpur reserved constituency in Punjab, won and almost immediately thereafter, became a minister. In April 2016, Sampla was appointed chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit in Punjab and reportedly threatened to resign when his suggestions on BJP nominees for the Assembly elections were not taken on board. He later denied he had resigned. But clearly there was a problem.

Sampla is not exactly a household name in Punjab politics — except in some households. He comes from the Ravidassia Dalit community and was selected to become chief of the party because Punjab has the highest percentage (over 29 per cent) of the Dalit community among all states. The calculation was that in the 2017 Assembly elections he would be able to influence this important section of the voting populace. 

Sampla is popular in Punjab for another reason: He is a local boy who made good despite social and economic disadvantages. His life has been a saga of struggle. Sampla lost his father, a Dalit of modest means, when he was just 16. Hailing from Sofi village in Jalandhar, the mantle of running the family fell on his shoulders when he was not especially educated. He quit studying when he reached Class 10 and had to start working to support his family. That was in 1979, when migration to the Gulf was at its height. He became a labourer and self-taught plumber in Dubai. He lived and worked there for 11 years as a plumber, returning only to get married, but went back, this time to Saudi Arabia, again in the plumbing business. 

In 1991, because of family compulsions, Sampla returned to his village and began work in Jalandhar. His transformation from a businessman to a leader took place because of pressure from bottom up. He opened a hardware and plumbing shop and had no interest in politics — till 1993 when the police came and took into custody one of the plumbers working with Sampla. He went to the police station to get him released and had to face a lot of difficulty. It was then that he realised that without some political standing, dealings with the police and other law and order authorities were simply untenable: Ordinary people were powerless and the police was there just to oppress them. He decided to join politics. In 1994, he joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and then, the BJP.

If there is one section on which no government has a stranglehold yet, it is panchayat-level politics. In 1997, Sampla became sarpanch of Sofi. His election was from the Dalit quota. Soon, he became the general secretary and convenor of the Punjab BJP’s rural wing. Later, he was elected vice-president of the state BJP unit. In 2009, the party overlooked his claim for the Hoshiarpur Lok Sabha seat (reserved). Instead, the Punjab government made him chairman of the Punjab Khadi Board. Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, he was made chairman of the Forest Corporation of Punjab. On that basis, he got the nomination for the Hoshiarpur seat in 2014, which he won handsomely. He was made a minister, but when told he had to resign from the central government to prepare the BJP as the chief of the state unit to fight the 2017 Assembly elections, he complied. However, it was during the tenure of a National Democratic Alliance government in Punjab that the murder of a Dalit youth in Gharangana village of Mansa shook the Dalits of the state. In October 2016, amid large-scale violence in Sangrur, several Dalit families were forced to flee. Sampla needed to answer.

He has little time for reporters. Poor media outreach is probably why reports of his resignation started circulating at the beginning of the Punjab Assembly election campaign. But even he probably knows it is a losing battle. So tempers are a little frayed. However, sacrifice, by and large, does not go unrewarded in the BJP. He will probably lose the 2017 battle — but the war is still to come.