DEHRADUN, 17 May 2009: With all Congress candidates bagging the LS seats in Uttarakhand, there is now an intellectual debate about what it would eventually entail for the voters, who had voted for the Congress and those who had opted for the BJP.
For instance, with the Election Commission choosing to display the final vote figure constituency wise, it is public knowledge as to how many voted for a particular party in a given constituency.
Post the verdict, it is interesting to note that sitting Congress MP Vijay Bahuguna, who successfully retained his seat from the Tehri LS constituency, had fared badly from Tehri proper, i.e., he secured 10,930 votes as compared to Rana’s 13,094 votes.
Other constituencies, where Bahuguna lost to the BJP were Purola, Yamunotri, Gangotri, Ghansali and Dhanolti. The moot point is: Whether this factor will be considered or would affect in any way Bahuguna’s (or any other Congress MP in the other four constituencies in similar cases) when it comes to spending under the Member of Parliament Local Area Development (MP LAD) funds.
(As per rule, each Lok Sabha MP gets a choice of suggesting to the DM developmental works to the tune of Rs 2 crores per annum in his/her constituency every year.)
“No,” says Shankar Chand Ramola, General Secretary, Uttarakhand PCC and Chief Campaign Manager of the party during the poll. “There would be no partiality. All developmental works in the constituencies would be carried out based on priorities and necessities,” he asserts, adding that due to delimitation, some of the assembly constituencies were new, so the verdict, in some areas, went against the party candidates.
“There would be no revenge factor in play,” he emphasises, pointing out that winning Congress candidates, would ‘sincerely implement Central government schemes under NREGA, Bharat Nirman, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, etc., in their respective constituencies impartially.
A similar view was also echoed by Harish Virmani, City Congress President, who was instrumental in setting up electoral committees in all the 60 wards for Congress Party candidates – Vijay Bahuguna and Harish Rawat. “Logically, in view of the next Assembly Election in the state (three years down the line), the Congress party would strive to see that there are more development works in areas where we secured less votes,” he underscores, while making a strong case against CM Khanduri, who he says should ‘step down on moral grounds’.
EC’s Motive
Though it is not clear why, despite being an LS election, the EC did not object to release of voter data constituency wise, a lower level Congress party worker confides anonymously that ‘it gives scope for partiality’. Though only time would tell on where the winning candidates choose to spend their MPLAD fund, the method itself appears questionable.
However, Ramola defends the present system saying, “This shows the way voters voted for a party. As a consequence, now, a party would put in more efforts in areas where it got less support.” “Work would be positive in negative areas,” says Jitendra Chauhan, another City Congress worker.
An inevitable corollary leading out from this predicament is: Whether the BJP state government would ‘punish’ those constituencies which did not vote for the BJP candidates or put in more effort to woo them back to the fold before the Assembly election also remains to be seen.
http://www.garhwalpost.com/index.php?mod=article&cat=Dehradun&article=1040
No comments:
Post a Comment