44 'five-star' contestants for BMC poll

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections will have 44 five-star candidates, representing five major political parties.

These are ratings given by two Mumbai-based NGOs to candidates contesting civic polls to be held on Thursday.

While Shiv Sena has 11 candidates in this list, Congress and Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS) have 8 candidates each. They are closely followed by the BJP and the NCP, with six candidates each in the list.

For the first time in any election, attempt has been made to rate the candidates based on their educational qualification, criminal record, track record in public life, source of income, total wealth etc.

The two city-based NGOs Association for Democratic Reforms and Action for Good Governance and Networking in India prepared these ratings based on the information given by the candidates in their affidavits as per election commissions rules.

Most of the candidates of prominent political parties have got 'very good' ratings with a four-star rating. While Congress has 130 contestants under this category, the MNS has 120, BJP has 43, Sena 80 and NCP has 122 candidates.

However, while analysing the numbers one has to bear in mind that Congress, NCP and MNS are contesting all 227 seats of the BMC, while BJP-Sena are facing elections as alliance and both parties are contesting elections on 72 and 145 seats, respectively.

Though Sena has maximum number of candidates with five-star ratings, it has also the distinction of having maximum candidates with poor ratings. Sena has 17 candidates with single star ratings, while its rival Congress has 11 in this category.

Parties have welcomed this initiative with caution. BJP's state unit general secretary Vinod Tavade said, "Any initiative to make our democratic process more transparent is welcome but these ratings tell us half truths."

We all know Vasant Dada Patil was one of the best chief ministers of Maharashtra and he was barely a VII standard passout and if you gave him lesser ratings over Vilasrao Deshmukh, who is double graduate and also belong to Congress, then I will say, it is not fare comparison, he added.

Expressing similar views NCP's state unit spokesman Prakash Binsale said, "in public life or politics people just don't vote because you are educated or half literate or you have certain level of income or not. Commitment to public life, whether you are available to solve people's problem in their hour of need, what is a ideology of your party, all these thing matter and they can't be quantified and given stars."

And we know the films given poor or average ratings by the critics many time do better business on box office than those who were given very good or outstanding ratings, he added in lighter vain.