Cross-voting spectre haunts parties: RS polls

But while the prestige of the parties is at stake in the victory or defeat of the Independent they are supporting, there is another parallel, more personaltussle, going on: between Sharad Pawar and Suresh Kalmadi. Pawar had earlier sworn to keep Kalmadi out of Parliament forever and has spent a good part of a fortnight trying to do just that while Kalmadi has not spared any effort to pull the rug under Pawar’s feet by engineering cross voting in the Congress in his favour and winning over a large chunk of Independent MLAs whom Pawar has also been targetting.

Pawar might have set the cat among the pigeons by calling upon "thinking legislators" from among the Sena and the BJP to vote "according to their conscience" at Thursday’s elections. His gameplan seems to be to rattle Bal Thackeray so much with talk of cross voting that he is forced to allot more votes than necessary to his own party candidates so that the surplus votes to Kalmadi from Sena-BJP are reduced. "There is a lot of discontent in the Sena-BJP because of the huge losses they are suffering, but how much of that will manifest in this election remains to be seen," said Pawar after a party strategymeeting at Y B Centre, even as the Sena was meeting just one floor down at the same venue to settle theirs.

On the other hand, Kalmadi was upbeat as seven ministers of state representing the independent MLAs and 20 independent legislators personally called on him to extend support. "It should not be difficult for me to win the election," he beamed.

The additional worry to the Shiv Sena is the Ganesh Naik factor and how seriously he can affect the party’s chances. Pawar met Naik last week and dangled a few carrots before him but nobody seems certain of how many MLAs Naik counts as his own and which of the Sena candidates he would hurt. Thus even after marathon closed-door meetings — first at Y B Chavan and then at The Oberoi — senior leaders of the Sena-BJP are still apprehensive about cross voting both in RS and Council elections. At separate meetings, Pramod Mahajan and Bal Thackeray asked the party legislators to ensure the victory of party nominees in the elections. While BJP is worried about thepossibility of revolt by a section of the legislators from Marathwada, Shiv Sena is still assessing the impact of Naik.

The highlight of the BJP meeting was that a record number of 11 independent legislators attended it and four have extended their support in writing. On the voting strategy, a senior Sena minister said final instructions would be given to the legislators only Thursday morning. "Each Minister has been given the responsibility of four legislators. All the legislators will be specifically told about the candidate to whom he will vote. It will be given to him in the writing," the Minister said.

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