MADHYA PRADESH: Bureaucrats rule
Why did Om Prakash Rawat, the former sarpanch of Mandiya in Madhya Pradesh’s Tikamgarh district, vote for the Congress in the 2003 assembly elections after fighting against the state government over control of water bodies? “I supported the Congress because during our fight against the district administration Chief Minister Digvijay Singh promised to help fisherfolk,” he says. And why did Badli Bai, who lives in Kakradhar village of Jhabua district, vote against the Congress? Hadn’t the state’s watershed development mission restored Kakradhar’s ecology? “I voted against the party because the government abandoned the mission. I had to leave the village for work,” she says.
Rawat and Badli Bai were two voters in an election where voter turnout (67.41 per cent) was the highest ever; the Congress went to the polls asking people to vote for decentralisation and development. Even the BJP focused on bijli, sadak and pani. Perhaps for the first time, candidates faced elections on such local issues like a villager’s old age pension or a panchayat not getting funds for a community hall. “The elections were a referendum on the Congress’s Panchayati Raj and development programmes. People accepted decentralisation but the party’s defeat is a message that it must be delivered honestly,” says Rawat.
Surveys after polls show the Congress lost heavily in its traditional constituencies