Phase 4: Evening Report: India has voted!
The then care-taker Prime Minister of India, Chandrashekhar had attended a campaign rally in Lucknow on 2nd May 1991. There were reportedly some 300 policemen deployed at the venue for the Prime Minister’s rally and the number of people in the audience was less than 100! Earlier, the PM had fought tooth and nail with his protegee, Mulayam Singh Yadav, to get a Lok Sabha ticket from SJP to his ‘special’ lady friend, Hiru Saxena from Lucknow to fight against BJP stalwart Atal Behari Vajpayee. Everybody knew that Mrs Saxena was neither politically competent nor had the resources to fight against the mighty Vajpayee, but Chandrashekhar was blind to all this.
Needless to say that BJP went on to win the seat easily and gave its best performance in the state till then by winning 51 LS seats, while the SJP managed to win only 4 due to Chandrashekhar’s affinity to distribute tickets to his friends and followers. Mulayam parted ways with his mentor and built the famous M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) vote combo and stayed at the top for almost three decades.
This is how tickets were “distributed” in India for long. All one had to do was to be close to a top leader and one would be assured of political rise. The change that Modi era politics has brought to India is that tickets are no longer given at whims and fancies of a few top leaders because BJP is so focussed on the “winnability” factor, the opposition too is forced to make each candidate count. Look at how Congress has distributed tickets in Karnataka and Telangana with meticulous caste calculations and understanding the capacity to mobilise resources. Earlier, in Congress ruled states, at least 3-4 tickets were simply given as “gifts” by the leaders to their friends and followers, now every seat matters because BJP and Modi fight every election with a total “do-or-die” spirit.
Take the case of Kannauj today which is an out and out Samajwadi stronghold that the party has won nonstop since 1998, for 8 times (including by-elections) and has been represented by 3 members of the SP’s first family – Mulayam himself, Akhilesh twice and Dimple Yadav too. Only in 2019, BJP managed to snatch it by a small margin. This time around, Akhilesh has taken matters in his own hands and is contesting from here with full backing of his party machinery. Normally, in the past other parties would tend not to divert too many resources in such star constituencies and try to focus on other “winnable” seats. In fact, prior to the rise of Modi, most top leaders of all parties would indulge in “adjustment” politics by putting weak candidates against the top leaders. Now that is no longer the case. Even in Kannauj, Akhilesh faced solid resistance today, so much so that it has remained undecided at the end of the day.
