Vote for cricket

VERNACULAR VIEWS

North: With the Indo-Pak series just round the corner, the Hindi heartland papers are also full of cricketabilia. In fact, they seem to have more of it than their English language counterparts.

Dainik Bhaskar has details of all the new trains and extra bogies for the matches, and even the fact that both Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi will be going to Karachi to watch the first one-dayer and that Prime Minister Vajpayee will wish the team good luck before the tournament "" the team is to visit the PM at his residence, and plans to give him an autographed bat as well.

Dainik Jagran has a piece on how four Indian players, including captain Saurav Ganguly and vice-captain Rahul Dravid, are on the ICC blacklist of players who've behaved badly on the field.

The commotion in Pakistan over the poor arrangements for tickets has also been covered "" a Bhaskar report talks of how, after a lathicharge on ticket-buyers, the Pakistan Cricket Board has decided to open up counters in various parts of Lahore as well.

Politics, not surprisingly, is the next staple, though a Bhaskar survey says that 85 per cent of voters have already decided who they're going to vote for.

Bhaskar has a critical edit on Deputy PM L K Advani's statement that Godhra is the only blot on the NDA's record "" the edit asks why Advani's saying this now, after keeping quiet for so long.

The star-burst over the BJP and the Congress also finds mention in Hindi papers with the same degree of scepticism as expressed in the English papers "" while Bhaskar has a picture of all the stars joining politics under the headline "Tamasha Chunav Ka", Jagran has a lead story on page one talking of how even the Congress Party's "ramp" now has stars!

East: Former Miss India and film actress, Nafisa Ali's nomination as a Congress candidate to fight Trinamul leader Mamata Banerjee for the Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat in the coming general elections was featured prominently on the front pages of almost all Bangla newspapers.

Ananda Bazar Patrika ran a front-page story on how Pranab Mukherjee is being wooed by the voters in Jangipur in Murshidabad district, even before his formal nomination as the Congress candidate for the Lok Sabha seat.

Aajkaal focused on Sudip Bandyopadhyay, the Trinamul leader who is being denied a party ticket to seek re-election to the Lok Sabha from his current constituency. Trinamul has instead planned to field Kolkata mayor Subrata Mukherjee in this central Kolkata constituency.

A special report in Aajkaal talked about how Bandyopadhyay had already complained to the Election Commission against Mukherjee's alleged use of the official car allotted to him as the mayor of Kolkata.

Clearly, it is election time for Bangla newspapers and the front pages are full of election news. The only challenge for a place on the front pages has come from the Indo-Pak cricket tour. The three-day conditioning camp for the Indian cricket team in Kolkata before it left for Lahore on Wednesday was extensively covered in all the newspapers.

Ananda Bazar Patrika ran as lead a report on how Sachin Tendulkar got out three times at a practice cricket match and how Sourav Ganguly had begun talking tough even before the tour had begun. Former Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan as a front-page columnist to write on cricket for Ananda Bazar Patrika was a special attraction.

West: India Shining, Bollywood joining and Maharashtra's drought-hit whining seems to have been the news bag in the vernacular newspapers Loksatta, Maharashtra Times, Sakal and Lokmat.

The India Shining propaganda hogged the limelight in lead news reports, while the editorials questioned the propriety of using taxpayers' money for funding advertisement campaigns.

Most reports in the past week focused on politicians defecting either to the BJP or the Congress and filmstars joining the political bandwagon, adding more colour to the festival of Holi.

On a more serious note, the vernacular dailies expressed concern about the acute drought situation in the state, where more than 1,100 villages have been declared drought-hit. They pointed to the apathy of the Union government towards opposition party-ruled states like Maharasthra and Kerala while disbursing drought aid.

Also in focus was the forthcoming India-Pak cricket series and its political ramifications towards the peace initiatives between the two nations.

South: In tune with the election fever gripping the state, the two major Telugu dailies, Vaartha and Eenadu, began the countdown for the approaching general and state elections with analytical and exclusive stories on the prospects of the main political parties.

When the notification for the polls was announced, Eenadu splashed a half-page article across the first page. In contrast, Vaartha published two tailor-made articles for its readers "" the opinions of major political parties in the state on the notification and a factoid column on the 2004 elections on its front page.

While Eenadu stuck to an everyday headline for the notification story, Vaartha headlined its story as "Show modalayyindi"(show begins).

In fact, Vaartha came out with quite a few sensational stories. When the crisis over the Congress and Telangala Rastra Samithi (TRS) alliance on the issue of Telangana had blown over with the central leadership of the Congress adopting a resolution for the second State Reorganisation Commission, Vaartha published the resolution in English, as an inset item in its banner story.