The general elections are round the corner and the consensus seems to be that anyone can come to the power. And that is of course very scary indeed. If third front comes to the power then we will have hodge-podge of parties that are hell bent on making as much money as possible as quick as possible and the results will be disastrous. Remember the period of 1996 to 1998? Nothing got done and we were in real danger of getting Mulayam Singh Yadav or Laloo Prasaad Yadav as our prime minister. Well, those ghastly nightmares are back. We may get them as our prime minister and the chaos will ensue. Muslim appeasement will peak out. Reservations will be doled out like Prasad in the temples. Private investment will dry out and infrastructure development will come to the grinding halt. Foreign policy initiatives will cease to exist and Economic policies will be shunted out and replaced with communist agenda. And we will be staring at the elections within next couple of years. But that’s not it. If any of those dangerous clowns get elected then that will be smack slap on the face of democracy. None of these parties have ability to win outside their base state. The maximum seats they can win don’t go beyond 20’s and yet they are close on becoming Prime-Minister of the country.
Now if Congress party comes to the power then sadly, we will be back to the square one. We will have a Prime Minister who have no say in anything. He doesn’t show backbone of any sort and refuses to be proactive in anything. Our country will get attacked again by the terrorists as well as by Naxals. Our foreign policy will be non-existent again. We will get into peace dialogue with Pakistan and will be attacked again by them in return. We will ask them to hand over the terrorists and they will refuse to do so in return. Months will pass and our moronic society will forget about those attacks and then we will have peace dialogue again. The inflation is through roofs and yet our finance minister who is also our home minister thinks that this is a good sign. He keeps babbling about strong fundamentals of our economy. Somehow he doesn’t see that the grain prices are getting so exorbitant that soon poor people won’t be able to afford daal-chawal.
The third possibility is that BJP wins the election and comes to the power with support from it allies. I would certainly prefer BJP coming to the power. Amongst the political masses BJP politicians at least get things done. Once upon a time, not so long ago to be honest, BJP had powerful second rung leadership. We had Arun Jaitley, Sushama Swaraj, Narendra Modi, Pramod Mahajan, Rajnath Singh. They were competent, non-corrupt for most purposes and nationalist to the core. All of them (except for Pramod Mahajan who died couple of years ago) are still in the BJP but something’s not right. As much as I respect L. K. Advani, let’s be honest here, why BJP is projecting him as a Prime-Minstrel candidate when he will be 81 soon? Why not break the tradition of giving post to the eldest and present rather younger age. It’s true that most of the ‘young’ Turks are above 50 but that means they are ripe with experience, an absolute necessity in Indian politics, and yet young enough to lead our nation for sustained period of time. But internal feuds in the party are well documented denting the image of the party as party of differences instead of a different party.
Historically, the elections in India are decided by very basic issues like employment, price rise and lack of basic amenities. The rise of regional parties should be attributed to the fact that they know how to play with people’s sentiments in this regard. But we are currently dealing with catch-22 situation. Regional parties scarcely think beyond their state boundaries. In fact they actively work against projects or necessary decisions that may affect their state in short term but help nation in longer term. Moreover they lack the vision necessary to develop the whole nation. That in turn complicates an already tough task of providing basic necessities to the common, which in turn (too many turns!!) increases the appeal for regional parties. I am not sure how and when we will come out of it. Perhaps when people finally start identifying themselves with nation they will start voting for the overall development rather than roti-kapada aur makaan Road to that destination is treacherous and onerous.
