Article

2009-04-30 India-Pakistan

[Bangla Daily Star] Hundreds of security personnel were deployed yesterday in naxal-infested constituencies of Bihar and West Bengal as parts of these two states along with other areas go to parliamentary poll in the third phase today.

There are ten constituencies in Bihar and West Bengal which have been categorised as naxal-affected in the third phase. Two helicopters would be used in West Bengal and one in Bihar in view of the naxal menace in some areas there.

The naxals had unleashed violence in parts of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Bihar in the first two phases of polls on April 16 and 23, leaving more than 20 people dead.

The third phase will see voters delivering their verdict in 107 constituencies, including Rae Bareli where Congress President Sonia Gandhi is in fray, and Gandhinagar from where BJP's prime ministerial candidate L K Advani is seeking re-election.

The electioneering for this phase generated considerable heat on Tuesday when main opposition BJP and Left parties charged Congress with misusing Central Bureau of Investigation which has taken off the name of Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, an accused in Bofors gun deal payoff scandal, from its list of most wanted persons.

Just a day earlier, Congress attacked Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi after the Supreme Court ordered a probe into his alleged role in 2002 communal riots in the state.

Modi, being projected by a section of the party as its prime ministerial candidate, hit back by alleging Congress has hatched a conspiracy to put him in jail while trying to save a foreign national, unnamed reference to Quattrocchi, once considered close to the Gandhi family.

The third phase will see completion of polling in 372 out of the total of 543 parliamentary constituencies while the voters in the remaining two rounds will exercise their franchise on May 7 and 16 when the counting is taken up.

The campaigning was also marred by incidents of shoe-throwing.

A 26-year-old computer engineer hurled a sneaker at Prime Minister Manmohan Gandhi in Ahmedabad in Gujarat but missed him and a shoe was hurled at BJP leader and Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddiyurappa in his home state. An attempt at throwing a shoe at Advani earlier was foiled.

Campaigning for her mother Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareli, Priyanka has wooed the voters by invoking memories of her grandmother Indira Gandhi.

It is not only Priyanka's nose that resembles with that of Indira but she has inherited the latter's wardrobe. And none in Rae Bareli misses the resemblance between the two.

"This is Indiraji's sari. She was shorter than me. I have to do some alteration in wearing it because I'm taller than her", 36-year-old Priyanka giggled and told media persons in the constituency when they told her that she looks like her grandmother.

On her marriage in 1996, Priyanka was dressed in a pink sari worn by Sonia Gandhi and Indira Gandhi at their wedding.

Agencies add:

India's marathon general election passes the half-way stage Thursday, with Mumbai entering the fray barely five months on from the deadly Islamist militant attacks on the city.

Ten seats in India's lower house of parliament are up for grabs in India's financial and entertainment capital, which has seen an increase in "white collar" political activism since the November strikes that killed 166.

Anger at India's leaders for failing to prevent the carnage has led independent candidates to stand and stirred the traditionally apathetic educated, urban middle class to take part in the political process.

Yet despite the awakening, national security is not considered a priority issue across the country as a whole, with the vast majority of voters more concerned with local issues that impact their daily lives.

"The belief that the 26/11 (November 26) attacks on Mumbai and India will somehow change the character of voting is quite wrong. It's exaggerated," said the editor of the city's Loksatta newspaper, Kumar Ketkar. "Terrorism is not uppermost in the minds of the majority of voters," he told AFP.

Politics professor Balveer Arora, from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, agreed. "There's no wave of nationalism in these elections, despite 26/11," he said.

In Uttar Pradesh, which sends the most number of lawmakers to parliament, all eyes are on two powerful caste-based parties -- one of them led by the populist firebrand, Mayawati Kumari.

Mayawati, dubbed the "queen" of India's lowest caste, the Dalits, is widely seen as the kingmaker for the next administration in New Delhi and could even emerge as prime minister of a "third front" grouping of leftist parties.

With so much support going to regional parties, there is no chance of either the incumbent Congress party-led alliance or the bloc led by its main rival, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) securing an absolute majority of the 543 elected seats in parliament.

Posted by Fred 2009-04-30 00:00|| || Front Page|| [5 views ] Top

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