Madhya Pradesh polls: Booze and voter awareness make unhealthy cocktail

It is common to find candidates doling out liquor and other freebies to influence voters during an election. But in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh, the district administration of Jhabua decided to put liquor bottles to good use. It went ahead and put stickers that said one mustn't waste one's vote on two lakh liquor bottles. The stickers, in the local dialect, read, “Vote jarur nakhwa nu, hamu sankalp karayi se” (we have to vote, we have taken an oath). But things went wrong when over-enthusiastic liquor dealers ended up placing the stickers on labels carrying the statutory warning about the harmful effects of liquor. After much ruckus, the excise department was forced to remove the stickers from the liquor bottles. These stickers will now be placed on houses, vehicles and ration cards.

A Mayawati on Mayawati?

Former diplomat Satender Kumar, a Dalit from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, joined the Congress on Tuesday. The party's Uttar Pradesh chief Raj Babbar said some more former bureaucrats, including a retired Indian Revenue Service officer and an Indian Administrative Service officer, would join the party later this week. Most of the former bureaucrats waiting to join the Congress are from the Dalit community, party sources said. 

The Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress are embroiled in a tug of war in north India. Mayawati was keen that her party, as part of an alliance with the Congress, gets a “respectable” number of seats in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The Congress was not amenable. Now, the Congress is apprehensive that Mayawati will scupper its efforts to get more than a handful of seats in UP as part of the grand alliance. Getting former Dalit bureaucrats to join the Congress is seen as an attempt to project the party as one with a huge support base among the Dalit intelligentsia and put pressure on Mayawati.

Mark of respect

As head priest of the Gorakhnath temple, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath must be accustomed to seeing people — at times much older than him — defer to him. During the swearing-in ceremony of President Ram Nath Kovind, many Bharatiya Janata Party leaders were photographed touching his feet. On Tuesday, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh filed his nomination for next month's state election with 46-year-old Adityanath by his side. Singh, 66, then touched Adityanath's feet and sought his blessings, before proceeding to address a rally.