By-Poll Snippets 8212; Surat

Colours make no differenceThere was an above average voting in Bharuch on Wednesday. An otherwise obvious upbeat mood among politicians and ...

Colours make no difference
There was an above average voting in Bharuch on Wednesday. An otherwise obvious upbeat mood among politicians and electorate alike was conspicuously absent throughout the past fortnight. Even on the polling day, majority of the people said they were sick and tired of politics. Nothing 8212; civic amenities, living standards or even law and order 8212; had improved during Congress or BJP rule.

Tea time
Polling agents at a booth in Narayanpura were cracking jokes and sharing tea together as there was poor turn out. Having realised that there was not even single vote in favour of Congress, it had withdrawn its polling agent last year. This year the same booth had an attraction 8212; a former home minister Congress sat there for some time as agent.

Young voters
Even though there were hardly any flags, posters, glaring loudspeakers, children and teenagers seemed to enjoy the poll-time. They played kabbadi on the party office mats at different pandals in night during the campaign period. On poll-day they thronged the booths and managed to cast votes and felt thrilled about it too.

Deposits to go
Nine were left in the fray. The six independents were Shashikant Patel arrow, Salim Pathan bat, Abdul Gani aeroplane, Dinesh Vasava hut, Bechubhai Vasava axe and Sayyed Mohammed Syed with a tree. God forbid it, deposits of all of them is likely to lost.

Morale down
Except Janata Dal workers, some of the Congress and the BJP men had complaints against their organisations. quot;Barring AICC treasurer Ahmed Patel not a single heavyweight came to boost our morale,quot; said a local Congressman. The BJP workers also said the same and even termed Kashiram Rana as sthanik or 8216;local8217; netaquot;.

Issues galore
It was an unusual contest. No candidate spoke of issues related to Gujarat or the constituency. National issues, corruption, failures, communalism and criminilisation of politics and society and charges and counter charges were raised. Need one specify more about each of them?