Election fever in India

Election fever has gripped the people of India, the largest democracy in the world. The general election for 543-seat Lok Sabha will begin on April 07 and end up on May 12. It is expected that more than 814 million eligible voters will exercise their franchise.

 The Indian National Congress announced its election manifesto on March 25 in the presence of its President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi. The manifesto includes right to shelter, affordable health care, providing jobs for the youth, in particular, in private sector, fixed income for the aged and disabled people. The manifesto seems to be based on socialist ideology. It also speaks about enactment of remaining anti-corruption bills. It sounds ridiculous because the entire country has been plunged into unprecedented corruption under the watch of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for the last five years or so. As a result of corruption, Aam Aadmi Party of Arvind Kejriwal, which has been formed a year back, won the elections in Delhi.

Arvind Kejriwal will contest Lok Sabha elections from Varanasi seat from where Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi is contesting. In fact, Narendra Modi is contesting from two seats.

Narendra Modi has been projected as prime minister candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). At a public meeting in Varanasi, Arvind criticised Narendra Modi and invited the latter to debate with him on the state of affair in Gujarat. Arvind pointed out that Narendra Modi has exhausted all subsidies and farmers are committing suicide in Gujarat.

Narendra Modi, whose image is tarnished because of his role in the 2002 riot in Gujarat in which 2,000 thousand Muslims were killed, has been appealing to the minority communities, particularly  the Muslims, to cast vote in his favour.

The BJP upholds the Hindutva ideology of its sister organisation Sangh Parivar. It is difficult for Muslims to cast vote in favour of the BJP. Muslims in India constitute 13.4 per cent of the population. Therefore, Muslim votes could have tremendous impact on the election. Traditionally, Congress gets votes from the Muslim community. It is likely that Muslim votes would this time be split among three political parties - the Indian National Congress, Trinamool Congress and Aam Aadmi Party. In that case, BJP stands a chance of winning majority seats in Lok Sabha and the possibility of Narendra Modi becoming prime minister of India can not be ruled out.

The writer is retired diplomat               of Bangladesh.  amjad.21@gmail.com