India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) leader Lal Krishna Advani speaks at an election campaign meeting before portraits of himself, the party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, left, and party president Rajnath Singh, right, in Ahmadabad, India on April 20. The multiphase voting across the country runs until May 12, with results for the 543-seat lower house of parliament announced May 16. (AP Photo)
Varanasi, April 20 (IANS): This teeming city, considered holy by Hindus, but home to a large proportion of Muslims, is slowly warming up to the political Star War as partymen and supporters of the three main contenders - Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal and Ajai Rai - have begun canvassing for votes for the May 12 Lok Sabha election. The excitement in the city is evident on the streets and in kasbahs.
People can be seen participating in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s chai par charcha (discussions over tea), five-time legislator and sitting Congress MLA Ajay Rai’s door-to-door meetings and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal’s chaupal sabhas (corner meetings).
“The people of Varanasi are very excited to see that their city has become so special. When a national level party announces its prime ministerial candidate from your city, excitement can be obvious. And such announcement works positively for the city,” Sanjay Srivastava, a professor in the social sciences department of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), told IANS.
But is there a “Modi wave” sweeping the ancient city? Its denizens feel otherwise. There are many for whom the “popular enthusiasm” for Modi is just “partisan propaganda”. “Where is the Modi wave? Is it being felt on the street? It is just a media creation,” said an academic in a government-run college, asking not to be named.
“They (media) have to sell their story and here it is, the big national story. It is the job of the camera to find faces, but these days faces are apparently approaching camera and trying to give an impression that they are all for one face, a national party. It is part of a big poll strategy of a political party,” the academic told IANS.
Said senior journalist Gautam Chatterjee: “The sights and direction of Indian politics is now determined by the corporate sector. They sponsor a horse and the media creates a craze for that particular horse like Narendra Modi or Arvind Kejriwal. It’s all about who is more profitable for the corporate sector, not for the public.”
A section of the city feels that it is not a good idea to ignore local leaders - a reference to Congress candidate Ajay Rai - in view of the presence of the Gujarat chief minister and the former chief minister of Delhi. “A five-year term is not enough for outsiders to develop a proper understanding about the ground issues of the city. Their understanding is usually guided by other influential people,” said Siddhartha Dave, a coordinator of an NGO that campaigns for health of women and children in the city’s interiors.
“In a city like Varanasi with its slow serendip lifestyle, not before two weeks from the vote can you be able to least figure out whose wave is there,” said a local party worker. “There is enough scope for polarization. Caste and community equations will decide the game in the coming days,” said another journalist.
Being a Hindu religious destination, Varanasi has more than 200,000 Brahmin voters out of the 1.6 million voters in the constituency. It also has a staggering 300,000 Muslim voters. Quami Ekta candidate Mukhtar Ansari’s withdrawal from the race, it is said, would stop the diversion of Muslim votes and would benefit Congress candidate Rai, a Bhumihar. At the same time, AAP is slowly making an ingress to the city.
“Polarization is not an issue for Muslim votes because full support of the community is with us. Hindu votes will be divided among AAP, Congress and BJP,” said AAP leader Gaurav Shah. “We are going to make a clean sweep on the voting day as our popularity and support in the city is increasing day by day,” he claimed.
“Our leader Arvind Kejriwal’s being an outsider is not an issue among voters as the Lok Sabha election in Varanasi is no more a local-level affair but it has emerged as a national-level event,” Shah told IANS. The gathering campaigns, with the growing traffic of leaders and supporters of various political parties, have meanwhile come as a bonus for the local economy.
“For a city that welcomes 200,000-300,000 tourists for various religious purposes every year, this political tourism may be a short-term opportunity, but it is definitely a bonus. And this is another reason of excitement in the town,” said the BHU’s Srivastava. “Political tourism is certainly beneficial for local vendors, traders, hoteliers, transporters, caterers and tent house service providers,” he observed.
NGO coordinator Dave, however, hoped the “political warfare should focus on grassroots issues like roads, electricity, education, employment and health that Varanasi sorely needs”.
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Narendra Modi is the flavour of Indian election coverage in US
Washington, April 20 (IANS): As American media reports on the sounds, colours and smells of India’s crucial parliamentary election, Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is the flavour of the season.
The big story of course is India’s ‘insanely huge and complex’ (Time), ‘jaw-droppingly enormous’ (Washington Post) election ‘juggernaut’ (Wall Street Journal), but analysts have on the most part focused on not who but how Modi may become the new tenant of 7 Race Course Road, the official residence of the Indian prime minister.
Painting the Indian election as a “face off” between “Nehru-Gandhi heir and populist Hindu nationalist” (CNN), leading media outlets as also think tanks, have dilated on the fortunes of the two leading parties - Congress and BJP - as also newcomer Aam Aadmi Party.
But “frontrunner” modi gets the lion’s share of coverage even as it is acknowledged that Modi’s path to the top office will depend on a group of secondary politicians, including “three ladies” - Tamil Nadu’s Jayalalithaa Jayaram; West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee; and Uttar Pradesh’s Mayawati (New York Times).
Time this week listed Modi as number one of the six choices ahead of musician Beyonce and President Barack Obama (3) in an invitation to readers to weigh in on 150 “artists, icons and leaders” who should figure in the magazine’s annual Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people.
A CNN story on what it called “India’s first social media election” also began with how during the Holi festival more than three million Twitter followers of Modi “received a personalised greeting from him.”
Some Indian politicians “are borrowing strategies employed by U S President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, with the use of Thunderclap, an online platform which helps to make content viral,” the news channel noted.
How “India’s Muslims (are) worried about controversial Hindu leader as national elections”, as a Washington Post headline put it, is another theme of American media coverage.
In the same vein, New York Times Saturday ran an opinion piece by Basharat Peer, author of “Curfewed Night,” a memoir of the conflict in Kashmir, on “Being Muslim Under Narendra Modi” “The Hindu nationalist who may be elected India’s next prime minister is no comic book hero” said the story pegged on a new comic book “Bal Narendra” (“Boy Narendra”) about the BJP leader.
The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine too has a piece by James Traub, a fellow of the Centre on International Cooperation on “Watching Modi, the Maestro, at Work.”
And to think that less than six months ago Modi was mentioned only in the context of denial of a US visa for his alleged role or inaction during the 2002 Gujarat riots as the State’s chief minister.
Now the visa issue is mentioned, but only in the context of what Jeff Smith, director of South Asia programmes at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, described as “the futility of the (US) visa policy” regarding the BJP leader.
Suggesting “the US government has so profoundly mismanaged a decade-long visa ban” he looks at a Congressional report that Modi “would automatically be eligible for an A-1 (diplomatic) visa as head of state” as “welcome - if long overdue - news.”
Similarly Richard M. Rossow, Wadhwani Chair in US-India Policy Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies writes about “Preparing for a New Team in New Delhi” even as he acknowledges “nothing is certain in Indian politics.”
