"Everything here is Muslim-centred. We want our due," a Dalit leader told this newspaper on Friday. Highly placed sources said that the local Dalit leaders presently involved in the party's election work had met the central as well as state observers in the last two days to air their grievances.

Sources said the discontent started with the party giving a ticket to BJP dissident Gopal Dhuva for the Mundra reserved seat, totally ignoring the 28 Dalit applicants who had submitted their fees for the tickets as per the party's requirement. All these candidates were ignored to accommodate the BJP dissident, they said. "We still reconciled to work for Dhuva considering him our own candidate, but we neither got logistic support nor any importance from the party leadership. This also happened with the two Dalit state observers," the sources added.

The party had appointed three state observers, veteran state Dalit leader and former minister Karsandas Soneri, Bhaljibhai Solanki and Babaldas Patel. With Patel getting the party's ticket to contest the Assembly elections in his constituency outside Kutch, the monitoring work rested with Soneri and Solanki, both belonging to the Dalit community.

Since Solanki met with an accident, it was Soneri who had to manage things single-handedly. But Solanki, who had been a frequent visitor to Kutch from Ahmedabad, always came by bus, as the party did not give him any vehicle to move around. He got the vehicle from some well-to-do members of the community, they said.

Sources said when local Dalit leaders met Soneri at a farmhouse of a Dalit leader at Bhujodi village on Wednesday, Soneri expressed his inability to be of any help, as he did not have any financial power. He said despite being a minister, he himself did not get importance, but still had to work for the party.

Irate at this, local Dalit leaders took up the matter with the party's central observer Govindrai Adik at the farmhouse of Meghajibhai Motharia in Toda village in Mundra on Thursday evening. Motharia is one of the top Dalit leaders and a former MLA.

Sources said when the polling was just four days away, Adik met district Scheduled Caste Cell chairman Danabhai Bagada. The Dalit leaders apparently voiced their concern to Adik that if things such as this happened to top Dalit leader like Bagada, the treatment meted out to lower level leaders could very well be imagined. It was then an apologetic Adik immediately passed orders for the allotment of one vehicle to Bagada.

The Dalit leaders also complained that not a single national level leader from their community had been invited for campaign work in the district, while senior Muslim party leader Moishin Kidwai was doing his bid for the party.

Dalit leaders said the appeasement factor could be well gauged from the fact that the party did not take any disciplinary action against top Muslim leader, Jumma Raima, who unsuccessfully fought the 2002 election from Abadasa, and had now filed his nomination from Anjar on a BSP ticket. Instead the party bowed to him and agreed to give him a huge sum from the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation for a local Muslim organisation, they said. One Muslim leader was also promoted to the party's post of state general secretary as a reward for non-revolt when his already announced ticket was withdrawn at the eleventh hour, they added.