Making unrealistic claims during elections
t makes me wonder why politicians in India invariably make tall claims about the positions of the parties they represent to the extremes of absurdity that often it fails them to hold meaningful debates with other parties. The recent interim election held for a parliamentary seat from Malappuram in Kerala, India, where it has been traditionally established as a powerhouse of the Muslim League, the voting results were almost like a foregone conclusion as to who will go to New Delhi, India. Still the two rival parties, Left Democratic Front (LDF) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who nominated their candidates to confront the Muslim League were making tall claims about getting a majority of votes to win the election.
The LDF in Malappuram, for instance, had made pompous claims that there is every possibility for a surprise winning of its candidate even though such statement defied logic. It would have been prudent for the leftist alliance to realistically say what they wanted to take away from this election. However, when Muslim League candidate P. K. Kunhalikutty bagged more than a significant share of the votes, for the opposing parties it was a question of being in denial as usual with all sorts of cooked up theories that sounded way too absurd for rational thinking. It would have been refreshing to hear if someone from the opposing party had honestly stated that the party nomination was just to test where it stands in the context of an overwhelmingly Muslim population, whose vote determined the winning candidates. The unrealistic expectations of these party leaders, either stemmed from ignorance or as deliberately concocted nonsense, are the perennial problems with politics in Kerala.
One may argue that oppositions play a crucial role in the maintenance of democratic proceedings, however often the counter positions adopted by them come at the cost of losing the peoples’ trust. Media is also to be blamed for overly politicising everything rather than looking at the bigger picture, which is the progress of the country, as opposed to increasing their viewer ratings.
The reader is a business development coordinator based in Dubai.