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Assembly elections : Trivial issues and alliances |
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The Assembly election campaigns of the BJP and the Congress are unfortunately throwing up trivial issues. Not poverty, disease, the lack of drinking water and roads, appalling education facilities, none of these.
While the BJP-led NDA is talking of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, the Congress is casting doubts over Prime Minister Vajpayee’s age and poor health. Observers find it disconcerting that after all these years of the our much touted democracy, all one can come up with is one person’s age and where another was born.
These two issues, however - Vajpayee’s age and Sonia’s birthplace - promise to feature prominently in the elections.
But personal issues will not win elections. Alliances will, as their own, no party as on their own, no party would stand a chance. Look at the BJP. The party’s very image was that of Hindutva, an aggressive Hindutva at that; it came up through its yatras (religious marches), supported by mobs of howling kar sevaks (volunteers) from the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. But it wasn’t enough, as later developments showed.
So the NDA came into being. The BJP lowered the temperature, assumed a smooth, affable image and managed to get some parties, all hungry to get at ministerial posts. But while the BJP formed the government at the Centre, its support groups, those who worked for them and did the slogan-shouting and campaigning, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, felt that they had been betrayed.
The deftness with which the BJP pirouetted into power by looking like something they were not has now been replaced by painful contortions by its leaders to perform a seemingly impossible act - placate the VHP and the Bajrang Dal on the one hand, and placate the other members of the NDA on the other.
But the denunciation of Sonia Gandhi as a foreigner might just keep them in line, at least till the elections, and they would in the meantime stall the temple issue with a series of confusing moves and incomprehensible rhetoric.
On the other hand, the Congress is doing no better. This party was the one that brought freedom to the country, and since then was in power for so long that they considered being a Congressman was synonymous with being in power. When that myth was shown up for what it was, a myth, they have gathered round their First Family. The servile deference to Sonia Gandhi is sickening for a generation of politicians who valued integrity and devotion to ideals above any family connections. But allies are surely needed. And if it means power, anyone will do.
It was Jayalalitha (Tamil Nadu Chief Minister) yesterday, but not today. It means Laloo Prasad Yadav (former Bihar Chief Minister) today, and Mulayam Singh Yadav (UP Chief Minister) as well. This is no ideological bandwagon. One can just see Ajit Singh (leader of Rashtriya Lok Dal) swinging aboard at some time or the other.
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