How low can politicians stoop.

Election results have been announced and the cabinet is formed. The last month or so parties were campaigning actively. They resorted to some cheap tricks. I will share with you some of the tricks politicians used in my state.

In our state (Tamil Nadu) we had daily power cuts ranging from 2 to 6 hours. Electricity minister was saying that he was doing his best to resolve this and created an image as though he was negotiating with power producers big time. But he was scamming big time. Industrial production in some cases were reduced to half. People were subject to difficulties. It seemed they have tried all methods but failed. But suddenly 15 days before the elections there were no power cuts. It seems everything was right. If someone cannot find a solution for a problem in three months how come he solved it just before the elections.

Ok, one may say these are the usual tactics followed and nothing new. But read the following. M.K. Azhagiri, DMK candidate for Madurai district and son of chief minister Karunanidhi was flat out bribing every voter 500 rs. This bribery was not performed secretly. No effort was made to hide this. The money was distribiuted door to door. The election comission detected this only after he distributed money to over half the constituency. No wonder he won by more than 1 lakh votes. Actually he was confident of winning by a margin of three lakh votes. Had the election commission ignorant he would have won by the margin he was confident of. Since he distributed money only to half the constituency he got half the margin he was hoping for.

Another really lame tactic was reducing bus fare a month before elections. Most Tamilians no that there is no uniform pricing of bus fares. For the same class of travel and the same distance the fares were varied. If someone questions he will be laughed at by the conductor and abused. They always had reasons like point-to-point and the like. I don't know what magic happened, one month before elections bus fares were reduced and made uniform. The change was not publicised much and was hugely unnoticed.


I sincerely hope someone puts an end to all this cheap tactics.