The elections in 5 states of India in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, and Mizoram are going now and the fate of all political parties will be locked in the voting machines until 3rd of December. The outcome of these elections are going to set the tone for Lok Sabha elections of 2024. These elections are the last major indicators of people’s mood to decide the fate of nation in the parliamentary elections next year. Anyone from India can imagine how volatile can atmosphere be in these states with every political leader running from post to pillar. As anticipated, the personal and political mudslinging, back biting, and bickering is at its worst and creating new lows in the Indian politics, every day.
If we look at these five states in last elections in 2018, main opposition, Congress party won the three heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh later loosing Madhya Pradesh to BJP. If going by the post-election trends and the unofficial exit poll results, Congress party is losing grounds in all the three states. Until actual results are declared on 3rd December, every party will claim to be winning in all states and after the reality check, will start blaming voting machines and everything under the sun for their defeat. After emergence of BJP since Narendra Modi’s arrival on the national scene, traditional politics in India has changed for ever. Its not that BJP did not lose elections after 2014 or just kept winning everywhere. In past 10 years, BJP has lost elections in several states to Congress and other parties, but they never blamed the voting machine or the government machinery for their defeat. After every defeat, BJP did introspection, leant lessons and corrected them to fight back next time in a more organised and better way. Understanding people’s issues, their problems and grievances and providing real solutions has been the key to their victories.
On the other hand, most opposition parties in India only try to lure, confuse, and bribe the voters by offering them freebees. A few poor voters sometime get into this trap and due to greed for a small freebee they end up exchanging their precious votes to unscrupulous politicians. For parties like BJP, it becomes very challenging, first they must fight with the falsehood being spread by opposition and then explain its voters what is good for them and for the country. There are numerous examples across the globe of the nations who adopted to same free-bee policies and now all these countries are bankrupt. Even the states in India where parties won elections by offering free bees to people are all on the verge of bankruptcy and under mountains of debts. Many of these states don’t even have money to pay to their employees a few months after taking over the government. This is a classic example of how politics has worked in India in past several decades and how the people of country have consistently been looted and deceived. People of India also need to understand that nothing comes for free in this world and there is a difference between the welfare and the free bees. The greed of freebee is dangerous for our future generations and for the economy of the country.
Today India is the leading economy of the world not because of offering freebees to its people but by taking some tough decisions that were going to decide the future course of country. For many years, opposition parties of India kept spreading lies about everything Modi government did for the good of country whether it was demonetisation, new GST regulations and other tough economic measures. If any of these false allegations had an iota of truth India could never become a 4 trillion economy by end of 2023. The outcome of these state elections will surely be an indicator what direction people of the country want to go to. Even a small deviation from the national interest to your own selfish greed can ruin your future and the future of your children for ever. We can only survive if the nation survives hence, we all must always keep the nation first. –Yugal Parashar