In Maharashtra, where issues hurl themselves at you, the Opposition failed to mount a strong campaign on a single one of them. The front rows of the Mumbai-Nagpur flight are usually the province of the political class: MLAs to MPs, ministers and fixers. This time, though, quite a few of the occupants were celebrities: television and film stars, major and minor, middling and mediocre. It wasn’t the T-20 cricket match in...
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The winter of our austerity by P Sainath
Growing numbers of elected representatives fund their poll campaigns with corporate backing. And growing numbers of people with a big business background have ventured directly into the electoral arena. Corporate Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid’s call for restraint, however mild, on the CEO feeding frenzy at the compensation trough, seems the least objectionable statement made by a Minister in months. (Contrast this, for example, with the Agriculture Minister’s warning that people...
More »Haryana poll scene awash with crorepatis by Sukhbir Siwach
Ahead of elections, Congress like all other parties has the aam admi on its lips. But most of its candidates waving the common man banner for the October 13 assembly vote are far from common. A survey of 489 candidates, about half of the candidates in the fray, shows that more than 50% are crorepatis. According to affidavits of candidates analysed by National Election Watch, a citizen action group working...
More »It is water, not elections, that excites people in Beed district by Meena Menon
Erratic power supply, poverty bane of Marathwada region About four lakh people migrate every year to work as sugarcane cutters Sugar factories contribute to water scarcity DHAITANA (Beed district): The Assembly Elections are not the reason for excitement in this village located in the backward Marathwada region of Maharashtra. It’s water. In the afternoon heat, women and children are running towards the only source of water located outside sarpanch Achyut Gangane’s house....
More »Maharashtra polls: all fronts and no back by P. Sainath
Will the Congress-NCP gain from a multiplicity of fronts which could dissipate the anti-Congress vote? Or will the Shiv Sena-BJP benefit from the Third Front’s cutting into the Congress-NCP vote? Whatever the failings of Maharashtra’s political class, and these are many, a lack of optimism is not among them. Even after the last date for the withdrawal of nominations to the Assembly Elections, there are more fronts, real and imagined,...
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