#PollVault: Avial Instead of Khichdi? Third Front Gets Cooking in Hyderabad
Every morning till the election results, The Wire’s reporters and editors bring you Poll Vault – a summary of the most important political developments, all in one place. To get it straight in your mailbox, sign up here.
New Delhi: After clearing the fifth phase of voting, on Tuesday, May 7, the national media finally has a good excuse for navel-gazing on Delhi: the national capital region, as well as all of Haryana, is up next to vote.
Attention swung back to the aborted love-triangle of the Aam Aadmi Party, Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party in the capital. Adding some movie magic to the Broom, movie stars (and The Wire contributors) Gul Panag and Swara Bhasker were in the capital on Tuesday, to campaign with AAP candidates Raghav Chadha (South Delhi) and Atishi (East Delhi). In the 2014 election, Panag was AAP’s candidate from Chandigarh.
They were joined by the Sandalwood star – not yet a The Wire contributor, but he knows how to reach us – Prakash Raj. Raj is also an independent candidate from Bengaluru Central in this election.
The BJP, meanwhile, had Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath visit Delhi as its star campaigner of the day.
In other movie-star magic, Sunny Deol, the BJP candidate from Gurdaspur, Punjab, managed to flunk the one question anyone could answered correctly – his thoughts on the Balakot airstrike. “Which strikes?” he said, when asked for his opinion on India’s apparently historic cross-border reprisal.
“I do not know much about issues like Balakot strikes or India's relations with Pakistan,” he later said to NDTV. “I am here to serve people; if I win maybe I will have an opinion, right now I don't.”
This may be a refreshing burst of honesty – though after Akshay Kumar being exposed as a Canadian citizen, it’s hard to tell if India can handle hearing the star of Border sound like an anti-national.
Election demission
Meanwhile, the Election Commission on Tuesday appeared to conduct a strike on itself. It rejected a complaint about a BJP hoarding in Mumbai, which gave Modi credit for the IAF’s action on the militant camp.
The Model Code of Conduct guidelines, the ECI said, “pertain to advertisements that are published or displayed at the cost of the public exchequer” – a deeply confusing reply, since it’s fundamental to the Model Code that no partisan ads whatsoever are issued at the cost of the public exchequer in the election period.
This follows a spate of clean chits from the ECI on all complaints made about Modi’s apparent transgressions; on Tuesday evening, the commissioners issued a new pass to the prime minister, concerning his remark about former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The EC did make time, however, to ask the NITI Aayog to respond to a Congress complaint on the potentially illegal use of NITI Aayog staff for campaign purposes, as analysed in The Wire.
Also read: Did Modi Break the Same Law that Got Indira Debarred – and Brought on the Emergency?
Yet most are ready to give up on the ‘election watchdog’. On NDTV, Yogendra Yadav said, “I don’t think we should expect any change … [though] this is one of the darkest hours of the Election Commission.”
Congress MP Sushmita Dev is not giving up, and moved the Supreme Court on Tuesday to order action on Modi and Amit Shah’s alleged hate speech and sundry other violations.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley’s new blog-post responded that Model Code “cannot encroach the right to free speech”, calling Congress “the ‘Cry Baby’ of this election”.
May 23 and me?
To be fair, with only two weeks left until the results, the commissioners may simply be, like the rest of us, busy planning their post-poll vacations. Others seem to be looking forward to May 23 as well. Speaking to the Hindustan Times, Amit Shah declared that the BJP would win over 282 seats, with an uptick in the party’s margins as well.
More importantly, in Hyderabad, the ‘Third Front’ began to reorganise at the residence of Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao. According to NDTV, his first meeting was with Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, of the Left Front, where they discussed a non-Congress, non-BJP prime minister “preferably from south India” (India has only had two such – Narasimha Rao and Deve Gowda – who led the country through most of the 1990s).
Avial instead of khichdi, then? Maybe not, as KCR got stood up by M.K. Stalin of the DMK. No word yet either on H.D. Kumaraswamy of the Janata Dal (Secular), whom he reportedly phoned yesterday. For the time being, both Stalin and Kumaraswamy remain Congress allies.
On Tuesday morning, a different formation of regional leaders gathered at the Supreme Court – no, sadly not to protest the handling of the sexual harassment allegations against the top judge – but to support a petition by 21 opposition parties asking for half of all votes to be double-checked with paper audits known as VVPATs.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu – who has been especially aggrieved about the reliability of this year’s voting – was present, supported by former Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah and Communist Party of India leader D Raja. The bench rejected the petition.
This article went live on May eighth, two thousand nineteen, at eleven minutes past eight in the morning.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
