Top leaders give electioneering a miss

Kuldip Bhatia

Ludhiana, February 22

As the din of a ‘dirty and bloody’ fortnight-long poll campaign for 95 wards of the Municipal Corporation in the city came to an end today, for the city residents the election campaign turned out to be entirely different as there were no big public rallies, neither the electorate had the chance to listen to high-sounding speeches of senior leaders or star campaigners of the major political parties.

Although the civic elections are contested mostly on local and civic issues without much mention of the policies of the political parties, it had been a routine that senior leaders, including party presidents, ministers, and star campaigners of the ruling party as also from the Opposition, have been taking active part in the civic polls as well. And then in the elections to the biggest civic body in the state, all major political parties, the outgoing SAD/BJP alliance and the present ruling party Congress, have high stakes.

According to local leaders of the parties in the fray, the worst sufferers of the absence of ‘a star-studded’ poll campaign were the first-timers with no political track record and the party leaderships left it to the candidates themselves to run and manage their poll campaign. “Local leaders did chip in to bolster the campaign of some candidates close to them, but others were left to fend for themselves,” said one of the candidate contesting the MC polls for the first time.

When the elections to the MC were announced after much delay caused due to the delimitation of wards, the contenders for party tickets from the Congress had high hopes that senior leaders, including the party president, the Chief Minister, his Cabinet colleagues or some star campaigners (like Cabinet minister Navjot Singh Sidhu), would address a couple of rallies to boost the prospects of the party. But all of them were in for a big disappointment as none of these leaders turned up to canvass support for the party or its nominees.

Similarly, the candidates put up by the SAD-BJP combine on almost equal number of seats for the 95 wards, were disheartened at the absence of senior party leaders including the SAD-B president and former deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal, Bikram Singh Majithia, the BJP state president Vijay Sampla and former/sitting MPs and MLAs of the two parties who could lend some colour to the otherwise dull and drab electioneering for the civic elections.

Unlike their Congress and SAD-BJP counterparts, the Lok Insaaf Party (LIP), headed by the Bains brothers, who are based in the city, along with their allies, the AAP, did organise election rallies in support of their candidates at various places in the city.