WHEN it comes to wooing votes, political parties in India seem to go to any lengths. And making outlandish promises during election time, seems to be one of them.
On October 13, states of Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh will go to polls, giving political parties a chance to attract voters with their manifestos and a catalogue of promises. But instead of offering more jobs, better infrastructure and subsidised rations, parties will now be appealing to the voters' cultural and ethnic identities.
Take, for instance, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which got it all wrong in the May parliamentary elections and was made to sit on the opposition benches for second consecutive term.
The BJP in Haryana has promised the voters that if they were to replace the incumbent Congress government in the state, the party would, hold your breath, ban western music!
“Western music and vulgarity in the name of culture will be banned,” declared a party leader at a press conference in this largely agricultural state.
Incidentally, Haryana is also home to Gurgaon, the swanky city near capital New Delhi that has a large concentration of malls, towering apartment blocks and is home to some of the biggest multinational companies, with a large number of expatriate employees.
"Looks like they have Mullah Omar as their political adviser...,” wrote R. Kumar on website JatLand.com, refering to the Taleban leader.
“Music has no boundaries... In today's world every second thing is adapted from some other culture. What if you wear a traditional dhoti (loin cloth) and travel in a jet plane (invented in the West), talking endlessly on cell phones (again invented in the West),” wrote another blogger Ajay Kundu.
But, BJP is not the only party to make such outlandish promises.
In the May parliamentary elections, Samajwadi Party, the main opposition party in northern state of Uttar Pradesh, promised to ban computers and close down English medium schools. Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, a former defence minister and a former state chief minister, argued that closing down English medium schools and providing education in Hindi, the state's language, would provide a “level-playing field” for all students.
He blamed computers for replacing manpower and promised to bring the salaries of the corporate world at par with that of the government employees. He also promised to stop mechanisation of agriculture to provide employment on fields.
The communists, in the late 70s and 80s, had opposed computerisation of banks arguing that it would result in job losses. Now, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) flaunts its website.
Asked about the party's past "short-sightedness", senior party leader Sitaram Yechury said, “We never opposed the technology. We only opposed job losses due to computerisation.”
And he claimed that adapting to newer technologies which can be utilised for the welfare of the people was an integral part of communism.
Probably, the BJP in Haryana will some day say that enjoying western music, perhaps with the headphones firmly in place, has been an integral part of the party's Hindu philosophy as music has no boundaries or religion.