Seva Dal gears up to combat rigging

While neither Seva Dal nor Congress leaders name any particulars party per se, Subodh Solanki, Maharashtra Seva Dal vice president told The Indian Express that their cadres had discovered gaps in several polling booths between the final votes cast and the number counted.

“Several ballot boxes wee also found unsealed but none of our workers knew how to protest and where to lodge complaints.”

This was confirmed by leader of the opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Council Chhagan Bhujbal who said one of his supporters could keep his corporation seat only because he had fiercely resisted the entry of armed goons into the polling booth in the night hours before counting began.

The SD camp which was inaugurated on Friday by national Seva Dal president Suresh Pachouri, therefore, afforded intensive training to their workers on the pitfalls of a lack of vigilance on its part at the 1998 Lok Sabha elections.

According to the state unit president Chandrakant Dayama, following the successful conclusion of the camp, the Congress has decided that at least two workers will be assigned to each ballot box and several more to each polling station in Maharashtra.

The state SD president claimed that while his party would not reveal strategies, the three-day camp had ensured in minute detail that there would be no slips between the cup and the lip this time round. “We are ready for them all,” he said.

Among the strategies he was willing to reveal in general were that party campaigners and workers had been briefed on how to combat the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) flip-flop on issues. “If they raise Ayodhya, Article 370 or the uniform civil code, it is a clear indication that they sense their weaknesses on the poll scenario and are hoping to sharpen the divide in their favour. We have trained our workers on how to respond to this.

Moreover, the party’s sudden concern with women’s issues, shows that Sonia Gandhi’s decision to campaign for the Congress is troubling them about how women will vote during the coming elections,” he says.

But if BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Atal Behari Vajpayee promises death by hanging for rapists, Seva Dal workers have also been asked to look for details on the recent spate of rape cases reported in Parli, Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde’s home taluka.

If that is not ammunition enough, then the Seva Dal, says Dayama, is compiling details of “the greatest balatkari (rapist) of them all” who has allegedly been sheltered within the Kalyan Singh cabinet in Uttar Pradesh. “If they have the sting, we have all the anti-dotes we need,” he adds.