A single conundrum that all political parties will like to crack is: What will get the people’s votes. The need to know the answer becomes more acute when the next election nears and most parties loaded with money seek out self-styled strategists who at times ‘deliver,’ as the media and politicians believe, when the party they work for, of course for a gargantuan compensation, wins. But seldom do strategists repeat their success because at the end of the day an election outcome depends on the people’s mood.
Yet with all parties believing that they could woo the voters – otherwise they will not be in politics at all – and swing their preferences, they come out with statements, proclamations and posturing, illuminating the road to the polls with interesting and at times bewildering or comical anecdotes and vignettes. Not knowing exactly what the people expect from them, the politicians try out different tricks. So we find a leader indulging in self-flagellation using, what his detractors described as, a soft whip, while some claim to have had close kinship with deceased leaders, say like LTTE leader V Prabhakaran.
But those were the old happenings. What is now brewing in Tamil Nadu is different. Dramatic allegations by the opposition parties and quick rebuttals by the ruling party is becoming the norm now. One of the charges that the ruling party now faces is a spurt in murders. Every death is closely scrutinized and every foul play is played up as a failure of the government. True, criminals can have a free run only if there is no fear of the law catching up with them and it is the government’s duty to ensure that the long arm of the law does not spare anyone.
However, when the leader of the opposition in the Assembly raises in the floor of the House to point out the rise in murders in the State, hoping to win brownie points with the voters and also get their support in due course, he is countered with statistics that point to more murders happening in his regime. So the former Chief Minister, Edappadi K Palaniswami, says that crime rates cannot be compared in that fashion, as we do with figures relating to the economy. What he was indirectly saying was that don’t talk about the past, look at the present and you will see gore all over and take responsibility for it.
Without going into the correctness of such a stand, what one would like to know is if a regime is judged by the crimes particularly the murders that happened during its tenure and does it influence voters’ choice during the elections. True, crimes, particularly gory ones, leave a lasting impression on the people but do the people hold the entire government responsible for murders that happen for various reasons and vote them out when their time comes. This is the piquant question that political parties find intriguing or have not found the answer at all.
Otherwise, why do the opposition parties want to vociferously accuse the government of not reigning in individual killers on the prowl and hope to gain political capital out of it? When the government retorts by recalling murders that the people view as institutionalized murders like the shooting down of protestors who took out a procession against a mighty multi-national company, they find themselves lost. Though every life is precious, murder committed by policemen inside a police station is seen by the people as more gruesome than a revenge killing happening on a highway. So when the opposition talks about the killing of a criminal on parole, the government reminds them of a father and son duo who was beaten to death in a police station.
No one can deny the fact that the people want a society without criminals and crimes and they also expect the government to usher in such an amiable environment. But when a party, in whose regime protestors were shot down by sharpshooters, asks why a criminal was hacked to death in broad daylight, it is only a case of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. At least the common people will look at it that way. Yet if the opposition parties feel that they can paint the ruling party black by pointing to the spurt in crimes, they seem to be running out of ideas to project themselves as an alternative.
Even the nitpicking indulged in by the national party – the BJP that has avowed to capture power in the State – are, to put it mildly, ludicrous. The local leaders of the party promoting the cause of Hindi or its euphemistic version of three language policy were only shooting themselves in their own foot. For, as those leaders themselves know, Hindi is seen as an anathema (whether it is right or wrong is not the question here) by the people and supporting the learning of Hindi will not make them popular among the voters.
Yet they all did it for obvious reasons. So, this trend of opposition parties raising trivial and mundane issues with a view to winning the next election is an indicator to an unhealthy political system coming to roost, chasing away the possibilities for issue based debates and people-oriented policies from its purview. All because the parties seem to believe that people will vote for the one who looted less and killed fewer people.
