The Independent route to power and pelf

Never mind the handicap that an Independent faces due to absence of an organised party network. “One has to manage the poll campaign on one’s own. One has to get the workers, the funds, look after the printing jobs, et al. It’s not an easy task,” says Ravindra Pawar, an Independent contesting the Trombay Assembly seat. Pawar, a grocer by profession, quit the Congress party after he was denied an Assembly seat and decided to go it alone. Now his wife Kaushalya has temporarily set aside her domestic chores to campaign for him, but his son, Eapan, stoutly denies he has anything to do with his father’s poll plans.

Nirmalkumar Agnihotri similarly jumped into the fray after being denied a Congress ticket from the Andheri Assembly constituency. “Since 1952 all Congress candidates from Andheri have been Hindi-speaking people. But Sunil Dutt ignored this and gave the ticket to Suresh Shetty. The Hindi-speaking junta is now with me,” he claims.

Assembly aspirant from Bandra Steven Fernandes also perceives community labels and not symbols of established political parties as powerful propellants to political success. He feels his victory from the Assembly segment is guaranteed by virtue of his being a Christian. “The Christian community in Bandra wants an MLA who is representative of the community. People who are working for me, therefore, are not my relatives. They are members of the community who are concerned about the community,” he asserts.

Surekha Jariwala, who is contesting for the Borivli Vidhan Sabha seat, however feels it is okay even if she is bereft of both a party or community label. After all, she is in the political arena “to settle some personal scores with former BJP MLA Hemendra Mehta.” Her son, Dharmesh, who’s helping her conduct her campaign, is nevertheless confident of her win because “she has a fine following.”

Jariwala says many people who know her, including members of an organisation called Savdhaan, have made her poll campaign well organised with their planning and involvement. It is this brigade, she says, which organises her padayatras, door-to-door campaigns and occasional public gatherings. Fernandes, on his part, claims that members of his community have enthusiastically come forward to assist him in carrying out his campaign.

But fund crunch is something most Independents find it difficult to grapple with. Fernandes’ way of dealing with it is to “circulate 150 to 200 dabbas in the constituency” urging voters to donate generously for his election funds. Jariwala will be spending money on her own, Pawar claims to have received help from “other Congress rebels,” and Agnihotri has opted to go in for a loan. Despite the paucity of funds, though, the confidence levels remain at a high.

Yet, statistics indicate that money has proved to be a dampener for many an Independent, or even for aspiring’ Independents. “There has been a marked decline in the number of independent candidates this time, both for the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha elections. The reason, as I see it, is that the deposit for the Lok Sabha polls has been hiked from Rs 2,500 to Rs 10,000 and that for the Assembly elections has been raised from Rs 500 to Rs 5,000,” the state’s chief electoral officer Dr D K Sankaran told Express Newsline. Another reason for the decline in the number of Independent candidates, he said, is that an Independent is now required to have 10 proposers and an equal number of persons to second his/her candidature. A returning officer, asking not to be identified, said the formation of the Nationalist Congress Party was also responsible for the entry of lesser Independents in the electoral area. “Many Independents must have got NCP tickets,” he said. But no new party can still deter many inthe city from filing their nominations as Independents.