May 5, 2004 - Chhindwara (Madhya Pradesh): Members of India's two largest parties fought with swords, knives and wooden batons, leaving 17 injured yesterday, a day before Indians in seven states go to the polls in parliamentary elections.
The fighting between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the main opposition Congress occurred in two villages in Madhya Pradesh (MP), one of the states voting today for 83 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha.
The fighting in Chhindwara, 700 km south of New Delhi, left 13 Congress workers and two BJP workers hospitalised with serious injuries, reported Press Trust of India news agency.
The cause of the clash was not immediately known, but election violence is common in India. Thirty-six people have died in the voting this year, compared with 100 in the 1999 national elections.
Exit polls after the first three rounds of voting in April showed an unexpected decline in the number of seats projected for Vajpayee's multiparty coalition, the National Democratic Alliance.
India's five-phase elections conclude on May 10 and vote counting begins three days later.
Vajpayee's coalition went into the elections bolstered by a booming economy and the prime minister's popular peace overtures with rival Pakistan. An opinion poll yesterday showed his coalition surging ahead of its rivals, but still falling short of a majority in Parliament. Vajpayee is a candidate in Lucknow, capital of politically important Uttar Pradesh state, which accounts for 80 seats.
Vajpayee will be casting his vote at a polling station located in a school in downtown Lucknow today, BJP spokesman Prakash Javdekar told reporters. Officials ordered security to be boosted at polling stations across the prime minister's constituency.More than 107 million people are eligible to vote Wednesday at 108,583 polling stations in Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu-Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Rajasthan and UP states.
Meanwhile, Congress veteran Kamal Nath is worried for more than one reason. He had always expressed worries that mutual mud-slinging between the Congress and the BJP could degenerate into open violence. He has been harping on Prahlad Patel's, a Central minister and three-time MP, criminal antecedents (21 of the 23 charges against him, mostly politically induced, have been withdrawn).
The BJP, on its part, has been circulating copies of a November 1995 report published in a national daily in which Customs seized several cartons of liquor bottles allegedly smuggled in by Nath.
On top of concerns about violence, he is worried about his election prospects. Not since 1980, when his political mentor Sanjay Gandhi asked him to adopt this constituency, has he faced a tougher election.
Except for a freaky loss to BJP strongman Sunderlal Patwa in the 1997 byelection, winning has been a bad habit. This time, however, he will have to quite literally snatch victory from the jaws of defeat to keep his slate free of blemish.
Of course, there are cogent reasons behind Kamal Nath's present discomfiture. The hard fact is that he has never contested under a regime where the local administration, from the superintendent of police to the collector, didn't dance to his tune. For no Congress-appointed chief minister's writ did ever extend to the district. Chhindwara was his domain.
With the collapse of the Congress regime last December, however, his sultanate came under siege from the saffron brigade: seven of the eight Assembly seats fell its way. Leading the assault was Chief Minister Uma Bharti and her loyal Lodhi lieutenant, Patel. Patel, in fact, was ordered by the sadhvi to shift base from Balaghat, from where he was elected in 1999, and be her charioteer.
To the discerning eye, the battle for Chhindwara is Bharti's very own in which she has staked a lot of her personal prestige. Patel is merely her point man.
And even after being sworn-in chief minister, she consciously retained ministerial charge of Chhindwara district. Again, she ensured that the rath of deputy prime minister L.K. Advani entered Madhya Pradesh from here to a tumultuous welcome. Prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee flew in specially from Nagpur to address a public rally a couple of days ago. So have a number of Bollywood stars.
To win, Kamal Nath will virtually have to overturn the results of the Assembly poll. Given Patel's proactive people's image, the backing of the state government machinery and the overall pro-saffron mood, this seems a tall order.
To counter the BJP bandwagon, Kamal Nath has been cashing in on his "25-year record of goodwill and development" and the farmers' anger over the power crisis.
Though some of the goodwill is still in evidence, there are many who feel that the bulk of the money pumped into the constituency over the years was filched by cronies. Farmers with even an iota of common sense realise that no state government wields a magic wand that can solve the power crisis in four months.
Adding to Kamal Nath's woes is the growing clout of the Gondwana Gantrantra Party, a regional tribal outfit whose leader, M.S. Batti, the sitting MLA from Amarwara, is contesting the poll. Of the 3.75-lakh tribal vote, the GGP had siphoned off a neat 1.35 lakh last December, the lion's share which would otherwise have gone to the Congress.
Intrinsically, the situation remains unchanged today despite last-minute efforts by Congress agents to drive a wedge in the GGP.
– With inputs from The Asian Age