General Elections 2014 – Day 5

Sharad Pawar and Arvind Kejriwal
Some are happy to hit ground & some are digging it to bury survivors
Sharad Pawar and Arvind Kejriwal
Some are happy to hit ground & some are digging it to bury survivors

Politicians need loads of luck, especially where the variables they have to deal with increase many fold. Sharad Pawar’s luck once again came to his rescue when his helicopter made a “safe” emergency landing.  Looks like, with lifeline card of his “helicopter luck card” used early in elections, he would need to seriously consider other means of transport. Jaspal Bhatti’s widow Savita Bhatti made AAP’s calculations go “ulta-pulta” in Chandigarh, she has withdrawn her candidature as AAP’s candidate from Chandigarh and has decided against sharing with media her reasons to do so.

Public sector undertaking HAL may reap “ulta pulta” election benefits totaling to Rs 18 crore too. Rolls Royce has “volunteered” to return this amount to HAL – this is the amount which was said to have been paid to commission agents for a Rs 10,000 crore contract. Now this is funny, if politics in India was so frugal  and Government contracts so cheap to grab, I am sure India would have been called as utopia by every single big and small business and there would have been no way that UPA would have found itself in this marshy Rann of Kutch or otherwise.

When you do zillion things, you can go and tell yourself and the world that you are entitled to doing at least a million things wrong. Arvind Kejriwal’s list of wrongs now include declaring the daring 3 RTI activists who survived murderous attempts in Gujarat, under Modi’s rule, as martyrs. One of the “martyrs” was quick to declare his faith in AAP and hinted at fighting  on an AAP ticket, if given a chance. Great, we can say India is the only country where even martyrs can fight elections. If you are not doing things wrong, you still have your rights to deny rifts which you yourself declared a few hours back. Murli Manohar Joshi Ji stopped just short of offering his Varanasi Lok Sabha seat to Modi Ji, I am sure somebody reminded Joshi Ji of his march to Srinagar and gave him an idea of contesting against Sheikh Abdullah from Srinagar.  Of course Joshi Ji wouldn’t have seen through technical glitches in this bluff.

Manipur’s politicians conceded that they are here for money and while they would still hesitate in naming their state as Moneypur, they didn’t hesitate in revising their income-returns by over 10 times over last a few years of political play. Citizens of Manipur are surprised, the common perception is that they missed a zero on the right,  they feel Congress politicians have multiplied their assets at least 100 times.

Politics is all about money and even if that means proving that blood can be thinner  than temporary political affiliations, let it be it. Raj Thackeray made sure that this message went  across loud and clear that his enemy is his cousin Udhav Thackeray, whosoever said that Raj Thackeray’s politics was all about being excessively ethnocentric need to study genealogy under him. Let me talk a bit more about studying, Akhilesh Yadav, the understudy CM of Uttar Pradesh has just trashed hundreds of crores of public money. Over 2,000 billboards across the length and breadth of his vast state had to be pulled down because of their violating The Code of Conduct. Fees for being an on-the-job trainee CM has to be borne by the state. Period.

Kejriwal Ji is going all over the place asking for missing 49,950 houses promised by Modi Ji to weaker sections of his state some 11 years back. Kejriwal Ji could find only 50 or so. While lost houses can’t be traced, Gujarat’s western neighbour Pakistan found something interesting. Aam Aadmi Party is thrilled that their model is not only scalable within India but internationally too, neighbouring Pakistan now also has a party by the name AAP and it has identical objectives.  While AAP was busy exporting concepts, BJP retained its focus towards importing talent in the form of winnable candidates. Congress is very upset with Dr Prasad for cutting a direct deal and have labelled him as a fraud in a halfhearted face-saving gesture, of course he is a fraud as he hasn’t shared his booty received from BJP with local Congress unit. It is not only Congress which is seeing the last-minute export of its candidates to BJP, Mayawati Bahenji’s BSP is finding it tough to keep in check even its sittings MPs. BSP came out openly against their sitting MP from NOIDA and dropped him for “cosying up”  to BJP. For a few politicians it is still winter. BSP has lot of reasons to worry, they drew a blank in Delhi and it is very likely that will draw a blank in whole NCR, Bahenji has some thinking to do.

With no yardstick to measure win-ability and torn between pulls and push from all quarters BJP once again deferred releasing their  list of candidates for Delhi. AAP and Congress have both declared a few of their candidates and they are on the job, BJP was anyway at a disadvantage because of AAP in Delhi, infighting within its own cadres may just total up to zero gain out of seven for them from Delhi. Mamata Di is still hopeful that hers would be the third largest political party and to be that, she must contest from Delhi too. Vinod Binny, the MLA who was shown the door by AAP, is trying his best to get a ticket and money which may come along with it.

Election Commission has woken up to loads of money being spent on Social Media by candidates and is finding out means to get the same counted as their election expenditure. Paid for social media is very big and its mathematics is mind blowing. It can be safely assumed that BJP is burning over Rs 10 crore per day and that is only what is openly seen as BJP. What is happening as “casual blogging, tweeting and facebooking”  anyway need not be accounted for.

 

…more to come.

 

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