Ticket aspirants beat drums for party, media

Take the instance of press releases lauding a certain Sarita Gupta. From the passionate tone of the utterances in favour of her nomination, she appears to be the quintessential apna neta, inspiring devotion not just among one group or party but among a cross section of voters in the Mandavali constituency.

Her champions include the Vishal Ramlila Manch which have made her out to be another Sita, the ideal woman’s representative for the BJP.

Gupta also gets backing from the Nehru Camp Jhuggi Jhopdi Cell which even threatens to vote for independents if she is not made a BJP candidate. The Delhi Poultry Supplier Association recommends her “as she is matchless in character and qualities”. Yet anotheroutfit, the Redi Patri Kalyan Samiti advertises her candidature saying she is sure “to make victory an easy task for the BJP”.

A more dramatic statement comes from a group claiming to be `the residents of Paharganj constituency’. It is addressed to the Congress high command and is a caveat of sorts.

The letter begins almost abruptly with the not very creditable bio-data of three brothers-Abhay Singh Yadav, Amar Singh Yadav and Vijay Singh Yadav. The writers have listed the cases filed against them in numerous police stations.

The immediate provocation for the missive is that the former MP of Chandni Chowk, Jaiprakash Aggarwal has been rooting for Abhay Singh Yadav’s candidature.

“Have FIR cases become a criteria for selection of candidates?” ask the letter writers. “If this is the plight of Indian politics today, then we are afraid even to think about the future,” it says and ends as dramatically as it began saying: “This is the need of the hour.”

The BJP recently got an appeal from its“grass-roots” in the Vishnu Garden Assembly constituency. They were recommending the candidature of Satpal Kharwal. In their joint appeal, the party’s Khyala and Gurunanak Nagar Mandals point to the bleak record of the party in that constituency-they have never won from there. “The party must heed the advice of grass-roots level workers for a change,” the appeal adds.