Despite their top leaders spending all their time and energy crossing words over terrorism, the local units of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are hardly making it an issue in the November 27 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections.
The BJP is not using terrorism to target the “minority-appeasing” Congress even in Indore, which has been a dateline for many a news report on terror in recent months. “This is an Assembly election and development is the key issue,” says Indore Development Authority Vice-Chairman Chandra Kumar Makhija.
Among those managing the BJP’s Indore office, Mr. Makhija pulls out a booklet on terrorism in a counter to a question whether the party has been forced to go on the back foot following the arrest of Sadhvi Pragnya Singh Thakur and disclosures of the involvement of some “Hindutva” outfits in terror incidents.
He rubbished the claims of Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad, as part of a “Congress conspiracy to divert attention from its failure to contain terrorism.” But, as an electoral issue, terrorism does not find primacy in the strategy of BJP candidates in Indore despite the arrest of the all-India general secretary of the Students Islamic Movement of India, Safdar Nagori, from here along with nine others this March.
Corruption an issue
Though corruption charges against successive Congress governments at the Centre and the recent controversy over senior Congress leader Margaret Alva’s allegation of ticket sale in the party are hardly issues related to Madhya Pradesh, the BJP is using these with gusto against its opponent. Daily, newspapers are crowded with advertisements listing a litany of “Congress follies” — both at the Centre and in the State.
At the local level, the Congress is equally shy of using terrorism as an issue to nail the BJP, displaying none of the glee with which its central leadership has been attacking the BJP after the Sadhvi’s arrest. Candidates admit that this is a slippery ground and there is no telling which way people will swing.
If the Congress is side-stepping the issue for fear of losing the majority Hindu vote bank, the BJP is going the extra mile to enlist Muslim support. Special pamphlets have been brought out in Urdu, urging the community to trust the party this once.
Let alone issues, campaigning in Khargone and Barwani — two districts bordering Maharashtra — is an uphill task, thanks to the cotton and chilli plucking season and the Election Commission guidelines.
That the commission writ runs large is evident across the region as campaign material, including flags and posters, is rare to come by. But for the odd campaign vehicle criss-crossing the plateau, there is little to suggest that the election is less than a week away.
So strict is the Commission and so mindful are candidates and their supporters of its diktat that all parties appear to have fallen in line.
What’s more, they are quick to report any violation. A day after the BJP was pulled up in Indore for distributing voter slips with a photograph of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Congress workers in Khargone were planning to draw the commission’s attention to a similar violation.
With the commission keeping a check on loudspeakers and the number of vehicles, besides prohibiting use of schoolgrounds for meetings, it is back to door-to-door campaign — a task rendered difficult in sprawling constituencies like Khargone and Barwani, where villages are set apart by vast expanses of land.
If this was not bad enough, the elections clash with the peak cotton and chilli picking season when all hands are needed on the fields. This has made the cotton collection centres at Anjad in Barwani a campaign hub as men line up — some with families in tow — on bullock-carts and tractors to sell their produce.
Chilli growers too are busy picking and drying their produce not bothering much about the elections.
In the Khargone constituency, Aslam Khan — overseeing chilli drying and gradation by women and children of the Jhamral samaj (bamboo workers) on the Naugraha Mela ground — has some interest in the electoral process primarily because a member of the community, Azizuddin Patrakar, is contesting on Bahujan Samaj Party ticket. Seldom are promises met, he says, lamenting unemployment among educated youth in the district.
