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Poll staring in face, CM goes on Vikas Yatra
 MALWA’S DUSTY HINTERLANDS: Politicians
faced with elections and a not-so-rosy reportcard peeping out of
their backpockets often turn to ways pathetic as they make up for
years of lethargy and apathy with expressions of concern in an
overdrive mode. Prakash Singh Badal did it in 2002 with ‘Sangat
Darshan’ programs and now Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is out
crisscrossing the dusty fields trying to touch a few hands, sip a
few cups of tea and get himself photographed sitting atop sand
dunes, all this while asking people to dump Badal and vote him to
power again.
He calls it a Vikas Yatra, makes no bones that it is a
triply-filtered election campaign of Congress but gives it the
official status of a government venture so that the public exchequer
can fund it unabashedly.
With headlines like “CM storms Badal bastion” and “Capt turns
people’s man” in the local media and huge photographs inserted as
advertisements in the papers by his spin doctors, the venture is
hailed as successful by the Congress, vulgar and gimickry by the
opposition Akali Dal and is funded by the people who find it novel
to see a CM used to chopper rides actually trying out the village
roads.
Yatra is a word with almost pious connotations but trust the
quintessential Indian politician to arrogate to himself the
righteosness
of semantics when he decides to mix among the hoi polloi, a score of
cameras fighting to get a vantage position on top of a vehicle
preceding him. And trust also the taken-for-granted induction of
religious element to elevate such a ‘Yatra’ to a different plane.
Newspapers reported that the CM “traversed a historic path which the
Tenth Sikh guru followed to salvation”, the CM paid obeisance at
Takht Kesgarh Sahib and Takht Damdama Sahib enroute, and God and the
local official machinery remained intensely drafted for the success
of the venture with an aim himself stated by the CM so pithily:
“Badal nu maanja pher diyo (Sweep Badal to the dustbins)”.
The five-day ‘yatra’ was flagged off from Nangal, crossed Anandpur
Sahib, Chamkaur Sahib, Koomkalan, Machhiwara, Raikot, Nihalsinghwala,
Rampura Phool, Takhtoopura, Panjgarain, Kotkapura, Bathinda,
Gidderbaha, Pucca Kalan and Talwandi Sabo.
Photo ops along the route were galore. CM administering polio drops to a
kid, sipping tea with a dalit family, eating from a thali sitting
atop a sand dune, or getting as blase as actually giving Rs 20,000
to a farmer and ordering sanction of tubewell connections within 20
minutes instead of the usual wait of three to seven years in Punjab.
15 November, 2006
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