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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JPR who wrote (7683)	10/3/1999 7:20:00 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Respond to of 12475

From an article (italics mine) : The fading charisma of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was visible in his political citadel as voters went about raising questions on real issues, on the concluding round of polling today. In one particular pocket, voters expressed their ire against Vajpayee by boycotting the polls entirely. Even as the polling concluded peacefully, with no untoward incident reported from any of the 31 constituencies, including the hyper-sensitive Amethi, from where Congress president Sonia Gandhi is seeking her maiden entry into Parliament, there was a perceptible change in the attitude of Lucknow's 1.5 million voters, 53 pc of whom actually exercised their franchise. In many localities in UP's capital city, where the last three elections gave a thumping victory margin to Vajpayee, voters seemed to be no more enamoured of the towering personality of the prime minister. Consequently, the lesser known Congress nominee Karan Singh, who was not even taken seriously, suddenly appeared to be giving Vajpayee a run for his money. In Mahona, the only rural pocket of the otherwise essentially urban constituency, total boycott was observed at one of the three polling centres. "There are about 1400 voters listed here and not one came to vote until 3 pm," admitted an official. However, voters exercised their franchise openly in favour of the Congress at the other three polling centres, even though the turnout was stated to be poor. Local residents complained, "Vajpayee's entire concentration has been on the beautification of Lucknow city, on which hundreds of crores have been spent, while we are starved of drinking water and the bare minimum power supply." Some complained of the "pot-holed roads and neglected drainage and sanitation systems." (So, hardly any drinking water and hardly any power supply; roads remain pot-holed, drainage systems remain crappy and sanitation systems remain neglected. What @^%!$*# "beautification" of the city was the old man trying to do? -- paint all the public buildings saffron?!) But that was not the case with Mahona alone. Back in the lanes and bylanes of the Walled City, men, women -- young and old -- made no bones about their disillusionment with the prime minister. "Yes, I voted for Vajpayee both in 1996 as well as in 1998, but what has he done now -- even if you take a telephone connection, you have to file an income tax return; you own a 900 sq feet house you are questioned by income tax authorities; is it justified?" asked Chandra Prakash, a retired government employee. Dinesh, who still served in the UP government was equally sore with the Vajpayee government for prescribing such low standards to cover ordinary people in the IT net. "They make friends with industrialists and affluent people, who go scot-free after all types of evasion -- but we ordinary, salaried people have to make rounds of income tax offices", he moaned. There were still others who complained of the government's complacence in taking stringent action against scores of finance companies which made good their escape after duping lakhs of people of their humble savings. "Every time Vajpayeeji came to Lucknow, he issued press statements that the government was going to bring in a law to fix these fraud companies, but what did he do", questioned Ram Mohan, another government employee who lost all his superannuation benefits to one such finance company. Sanjeev Misra, an unemployed youth felt the same as he lost his only source of livelihood after the finance company he was employed with simply vanished. He claimed, "There were thousands like me who were on the streets on account of such finance companies closing shop and vanishing into thin air." ( Bogus financial companies that vanish faster than drops of water on a hot skillet, and a big-mouthed government that does nothing about it! No wonder that the Indians love to hoard their wealth in the form of gold, even if its long-term trend is to go down in value! Certainly better than losing it all overnight to some scamster whom the government is unable or unwilling to prosecute! )