ADDRESSING party members recently in Bombay, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray spoke about the prospective Sena Lok Sabha candidates he had interviewed. "I don't find appropriate candidates. I told them they don't know English, they don't know Hindi...what will they talk in Parliament?" Thackeray highlighted language, but across India parties were scouring the land for suitable boys and girls in vain, for various reasons.
Maharashtra first. "Forget the results, we have to first worry about the candidates," confided a Sena leader, referring to the trouble the party had shortlisting 20 prospective Lok Sabha candidates from the state. Once the Sena list was released, there were some unlikely faces, of political greenhorns. Such as the suave industrialist Parvez Damania, fielded from Congress stronghold Ahmednagar South, and banker Suresh Prabhu, fielded in Rajapur in coastal Maharashtra against heavyweights like Madhu Dandavate, MP for five terms, and sitting Congress MP Sudhir Sawant.
The Sena squabbled successfully for the Thane seat, pushing out the BJP's sitting MP Ram Kapse. The replacement: a corporator, Prakash Paranjpe. The Sena cites the fact that it's fresh from two recent civic election victories here. But that's not been much consolation for rebellious local BJP workers or Jagannath Patil, a BJP minister from Thane who threatened to resign. "We had to sacrifice Kapse for the sake of the alliance," complained one BJP leader.
Corporators, legislators and Rajya Sabha members have been roped in to contest the Lok Sabha elections in most of the states. And if it's not the familiar assortment of falling cine stars, parties have fallen back on the usual suspects—relatives of corruption-tainted politicians who can't be fiel-ded for obvious reasons. After all the brouhaha about Brij Bhushan Sharan, the BJP MP from Gonda, Uttar Pradesh, who is behind bars for allegedly sheltering Dawood Ibrahim's men, his wife Ketaki Singh has been given a ticket. A more interesting sideshow comes in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh. Kamal Nath may be a hawala dropout, but his wife, Alka, does fit the Congress' new-found, corruption-free yardstick. And so, she gets the nod. It does not matter that she's a relative nobody in Chhindwara. Or that the rebellion-minded Kamal Nath has also filed his nomination for the seat, opposite his own wife.
Then again, replacements are often strange. Shailendra Mahato, MP from Jamshedpur, is now out of the BJP. So the party has now handed this seat to actor Nitish Bharadwaj, who played Krishna in the teleserial, Mahabharat. Bharadwaj has been moved out from Mathura.
In Rajasthan, it was impossible for the Congress to field Rohtas Kumar—despite his clique in Delhi, the local Congress would not have a man dismissed from the IPS. The BSP, however, didn't mind his image, so the party has fielded him from Bayana. In Jodhpur, the BJP finally had to settle for its state minister Jaswant Singh, admittedly a weak rival for the Congress' formidable Ashok Gehlot.
"All the parties are finding it difficult to get candidates. We have tapped half a dozen people who would have suited us. Trouble is, upright people don't want to contest and then we will have complaints about criminals in politics," says M.P. Vashi, a lawyer who filed his nomination for the Bombay North West seat on a Janata Dal ticket. Vashi himself is in a spot, what with the JD ally, the Samajwadi Party, putting up a rival candidate.
When the redoubtable Sunil Dutt turned his back on this polls, the Congress could find no better replacement for Bombay North West than former mayor Nirmala Samant-Prabhavalkar. And in Bombay North, it has had to settle for the little-known Anoopchand Shah, who has been humbled more than once in the past by the BJP incumbent, Ram Naik.
As they go out to seek votes, many a first timer will learn lessons that'll lead them, if not to Parliament, then at least to a better understanding of Indian democracy.
