A furious Narmada has reduced elections and electioneering in the Hoshangabad Lok Sabha constituency - where last Saturday's polling had to be postponed due to floods - to a farce. Over 100 villages are marooned and two dozen persons are reported to have been killed. The Army has been called to help. Yet both the principal combatants - former Chief Minister Sundarlal Patwa (BJP) and local Congress legislator Raj Kumar Patel - are trying to fish in troubled waters. Their common objective: how to exploit the predicament of the flood victims and get their votes?``Inki dum kabhi sidhi nahin hogi,'' (They will never change) says Gaya Prasad scornfully as he opens one of the food-packets dropped in the flooded Gwaltoi area of the city. Inside it is a pamphlet seeking their vote. ``Politicians never stop thinking of votes,'' he chuckles. An enterprising Patel, in fact, swam through the rising waters in Itarsi's Sethani ghat to reach Aggarwala dharmshala on Sunday. ``I am going to pray for you,'' hetold the trapped persons and then, for effect, swam up to the nearby Jagdish temple to complete the ritual.Pawta, as would fit a leader of his stature, rushed to Bhopal to spearhead a campaign against the Congress government for its failure to tackle the situation. A hue and cry for more relief - Patwa has sent an SOS to Prime Minister Vajpayee for special aid for Hoshangabad - however, is only one prong of the BJP strategy. ``Digvijay Singh has transferred money sent for the National Defence Fund to the CM's relief fund. It is going neither to the Kargil victims, nor to the flood victims,'' says Patwa.Far from the arena of this political shadowboxing, Suraj Bhan of Sarkheda village in Salvani tehsil is stunned by the news that the polling in Hoshangabad has been postponed. ``But we voted only yesterday,'' he says, shaking his head.Polling in the entire constituency was postponed by the Chief Election Commissioner late on Friday night because polling parties could not reach over 800 pollingcentres. By Saturday, things had deteriorated to such an extent that it was not possible to communicate the postponement decision to everybody. The residents of Sarkheda and dozens of other villages which unwittingly went through the polling process on Saturday will now have to cast their vote again on September 28.Will they? ``We are fighting for our lives. We don't have time to think about anything,'' wails Lajo, the woman sarpanch of Bekore. Overflowing nullahs have cut the village off from the world.Back in Hoshangabad city, the politicians have become cynical. ``People will now turn against the Congress for forcing this election,'' says Ramsevak Mishra a young BJP activist. The supporters of Congress candidate Raj Kumar Patel do not agree. ``The people can't be fooled,'' they say. ``While we have stopped playing politics and started relief work, Patwa has left the people in the lurch and run off to Bhopal and Delhi for politicking.''Not that the BJP activists are not active in reliefoperations. One can see vehicles flying BJP flags rushing towards marooned areas with food packets and other material. RSS volunteers are in the forefront of the relief operations. They, in turn, accuse Congressmen of misusing the state machinery. ``In the name of relief work, the officials are allowing Congressmen to use the state machinery for campaigning,'' Raj Kumar a BJP functionary in Rajaun alleged.Mutual acrimony apart, both Congress and BJP workers can be seen distributing election pamphlets at the flood relief camps set up by the administration. ``What's wrong with it?'' asks a campaign manager. He points out that since polling has been postponed by 10 days, the poll expenses of the candidates were bound to increase. For politicians, floods during elections might prove only a costly nuisance. ``But for the ordinary folk of Hoshangabad and its nearby areas - poor farmers and innocent tribals - there is no time to think of the future,'' says litterateur Narmada Prasad Tripathi. ``They arefighting to live out the day. How can they think of the future?''
