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ShareThis is the fun part of an election. Who's making up to whom, who has more to gain or lose, who is holding a card now to be produced as trump much later and who is the main king-maker, gambler, pawn and so on. This kind of speculation works best when the voters are divided into easily definable categories: Vote banks determined by caste, community, religion, region, language, for instance.
The second scenario will be the plight of the electorate: how and who to vote for. As recent elections across the country have shown, voters are looking outside their confining pigeonholes. This is not necessarily because of some massive emotional issue which has caused a swing or the enormous charisma of a single candidate. The definitions are changing.
This means that the politician is required to do a major rethink. Delimitation has already changed his constituency beyond all recognition in some cases. (It will be quite amusing to see how reservations for women will skew the electoral pitch even further.) And now voters are behaving in unpredictable ways, even perhaps thinking for themselves rather than blindly giving in to their herd mentality.
Voters, strangely for all politicians may know, no longer seem to want to rush to their deaths over a cliff like the lemmings of the legend. Sadly, it is unclear whether voters in Maharashtra will have these eureka moments and give politicians the grief they so badly need. The performance of the current government -- before and after the change in chief minister late last year -- has been dismal.
Do the problems need recounting? The farmers' suicides, the power situation, the social development indicators, the fact that investment is still coming based on past laurels not new initiatives, that if you remove Mumbai and a couple of other urban centres the state falls close to the bottom as far as progress and growth are concerned.
Then there's Mumbai itself. The rot started in the 1990s when the city was seen as a prime cash cow by politicians many of whom come from elsewhere and had no sense of engagement with it. Since then, selling the city to the highest bidder or any bidder who comes along is a game that everyone plays.
Isn't it amazing that at a time when the real estate industry has either been showing negative growth or moving ahead very slowly, new projects are regularly announced, with special government incentives, week after week? Development rules, regulations, zoning, floor space index, open spaces -- everything is available for a price. The price, of course, is being paid by all of us.
What then are we to do? One way out is to laugh at the extent of the scrambling for seats but use this as a barometer to check the desperation levels of parties and prospective candidates. For instance, one MLA, under threat from a challenger in his own party, has hired a pubic relations firm to spread the word about the work he has done in his constituency. Will he be able to drum up enough public support to pressurise his party to pick him again?
The second is to weigh the work done by this government and the work done by the Opposition when it was in power -- and where it is in power at municipal levels -- and then start weeping when you realise that most likely, there's no option at all.
