March 24, 2004

NEW DELHI: The Bhartiya Janata Party has resorted to the same caste arithmatic that it paid it dividends in the November Assembly elections to bolster its prospects in the caste-ridden states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the Lok Sabha elections.

Armed with the caste profiles of each constituency got prepared with the help of the RSS "pracharaks" posted in the constituencies to help the BJP while remaining in the background, the party has picked up candidates who can dent the casteist politics played by the rival parties.

In western Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav had deliberately given ten seats to the Rashtriya Lok Dal of Ajit Singh, son of late Prime Minister Charan Singh, to sway the Jat votes, but the BJP has also played back the same caste coin by fielding against Ajit Singh himself from Baghpa none else but his own one-time close friend and Jat leader Satpal Malik.

In a nearby Muzaffarnagar costituency, the BJP has fielded Amar Pal Singh, a Thakur, who had been earlier winning the Meerut seat in the last three elections. Another Jat leader picked up by the BJP for Kairana seat is Amar Kant Rana, a Jat who was a follower of Ajit Singh till recently. In
Saharanpur, the BJP is playing the Gujjar card by fielding a veteran Gujjar leader, Yashpal Singh, who joined the party only last week quitting the Congress.

The BJP's target is to win at least 35 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats to achieve his revised aim at a minimum 200 seats in the country on its own and two surveys got conducted by it have shown clearly that the castes would play a major role in the elections and that is why the party has tried to finetune the caste arithmatic even at the cost of the local party workers' unhappiness in selection of the candidates. The party is counting on the candidates' own community vote bank.

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The BJP has fielded more than 150 of its 182 MPs in the dissolved Lok Sabha despite its own internal reports suggesting a score of them not doing much in the constituencies to have the same kind of voters' support. The elected representatives have their own supporters and hence dropping a large number of them would have created dissidence of these supporters which prevented the party from fielding many new faces.

As an insider points out, the party is placed in the same kind of situation as was the Congress in Rajasthan where almost everyone wanted Ashok Gehlot to continue as the chief minister but the people were not happy with their local Congress MLAs. The popularity graph of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is quite high but the same is not the case with others and that is why the party is asking for votes in the name of Vajpayee.

Going a step further, the BJP has now planned that Vajpayee should personally appeal to the voters for electing each of the BJP and NDA candidate as his popularity may work on many to vote for the man of Vajpayee's choice. So don't be surprised if you get a phone call from Vajpayee in the coming days, identifying himself as "main Atal Bihari Vajpayee bol Raha hun" and then urging you to vote for a particular candidate to strengthen his hands. You won't be able to talk to him as it would be a taped voice. It will be a second round of calls from him as already the party had played a similar taped message from him to millions of phone users, both mobile and landline, to appeal for voting the BJP and the NDA. The only difference this time is that he would also appeal to vote for the particular candidate. He won't have to record the message for each candidate again and again as all that he will do is to record one message and then read out names of all candidates that will be subsequently merged into his message using the computers as one does in mail merge to churn out personalised letters using programmes like Microsoft Word.

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Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani knows that "Ayodhya" is a magic word that has been giving votes to the BJP and hence he may kept saying that "Ayodhya" is not an issue in this election but he himself does not forget to talk about construction of the "Ram Mandir" at Ayodhya at every stop of his yatra that is now passing through Uttar pradesh. While in Mathura, he talks of "Ram Mandir" and "Ram Rajya", promising both if the BJP is back in power. Even in the Muslim-dominated Aligarh, he vowed to build the temple but also sought to assure the assembled crowd that it would be through negotiations and without any bitterness among the communities.

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Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar has sought to remove the stigma slapped on him by a section of the Maharashtra Congress leaders for their candidate's defeat in the Sholapur Lok Sabha by-election by choosing Sholapur as the first destination of his joint campaign with Congress Prsident Sonia Gandhi on March 29. Both leaders will be jointly offering prayers at the Goddess Tuja Bhawani temple at Tuljapur before addressing a public meeting at Sholapur.

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Chief Election Commissioner T S Krishna Murthi was keen to issue directives against the personalised attacks during the elections to have a dignified debate instead of mudslinging but he chose not to do anything when one of his Election Commissioner colleague pointed out that it may give an impression as if the Commission is trying to protect Congress President Sonia Gandhi who is mostly at the receiving end of such attacks.

Sensing that the full bench may not endorse his idea of banning the personalised attacks, Krishna Murthi has dropped the move pointing out that there are enough laws in the country to deal with defamation.

He is, however, still trying to find out some way to prevent the bitterness that is coming in the electioneering and that is why the Commission spokesman sought to tell reporters "to wait and see" while pointing out that the Commission ha received complaints of the personalised attacks on political leaders and it was examining them.

Krishna Murthi is likely to take up the issue at an all-party meeting convened by the Election Commission on April 6 to find out if the Model Code of Conduct for elections could be suitably amended to stop the personalised attacks.

The political parties are, however, intrigued from the Election Commission calling the meeting to discuss about the ban on the exit and opinion polls once the polling starts. The issue was more or less settled in the last election and that is why the Election Commission had even withdrawn its
petition from the Supreme Court in the matter but the Commission seems having second thoughts as its spokesman was quite forthright in pointing out that whatever decision is taken would be based on the consensus at the meeting with leaders of all parties.

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The Election Commission finds itself in an awkward position from the Andhra Pradesh High Court quashing the ban on the political advertisements on TV and Radio as it had extinguished its locus standi at the stage of imposition of the ban itself. Washing off its responsibility, the Commission had forced the Information and Broadcasting Ministry to implement Section 7 of the Cable TV Regulation Act, 1995, asserting that enforcement of the laws of the land is the government's responsibility. The particular Section bans political and religious advertisements on the electronic media.

Since it was the I&B Ministry's ban order that has been quashed by the High Court, it is for the Ministry to go into appeal. There is, however, no question of the Ministry doig anything in the matter since the ruling BJP was not happy in the first instance at the Commission trying to force
the ban on the TV advertisements. It had sought to wriggle out, pleading that it did not have the mechanism to keep a check on all TV channels that have mushroomed into a very large number. The Government, however, decided not to cross swords with the Election Commission and hence the Ministry quietly notified all the TV networks about the ban on political advertisements as already provided under the Act.

In fact, BJP General Secretary Pramod Mahajan had got prepared a series of TV campaigns that has to be abandoned by the party. Since Tuesday, the party managers are, however, busy pulling out all those campaigns and trying to see how fast they can put them on TV.