Indian Elections - Random Round-up!

The Great Indian Election is over. The smaller parties, most of whom would want to be on the winning side, are literally "Talking to the hand". In the post election Govt. forming frenzy - an unavoidable side-effect of the multi-party system - let me put a word in, on the goings on. Both good and bad.

While the Americans have had their problems with hanging chads over the years, we Indians have done remarkably well with our indigenous Electronic Voting Machines. It has increased the confidence of the people in the voting process. Though ballot-box stuffing is a thing of the past, booth capturing is still a problem in many areas. In West Bengal 5 polling stations had re-elections as alleged booth capturing or EVM malfunction took place.

Online, Twitter was alive with the reactions (and news) on the election results. Helped by the fact that it was Friday night in the US, the #indiavotes09 tag was the hottest trend on Saturday. What we must learn from that is that more than the elections themselves, the netizens are more interested in the results, with people likening it to watching a humdinger of a cricket match. The online interest was so large that the Election Comission site crawled to halt. Of course you can't attribute that just to the traffic!

Candidates updating their status online was not so common to find. While they were all trying to woo us during the campaign, quite like Obama, they faded away once the results started coming out. All except Mr.Shashi Tharoor, who was active online as he gave his reactions on Twitter. His enthusiasm was lapped up by the netizens, who have him jotted down as a favorite for the post of External Affairs Minister.

At the end of the day, you have to say that controversies were much lesser than in other elections, though they are never really absent. The current Home Minister, P.Chidambaram (sitting as thoughtfully as Shashi Tharoor is above but probably for different reasons), won from Sivaganga (TN) after a recount. How it is possible for a candidate to gain 4000 votes on recounting when we use electronic voting machines, I will never know. It looks like this case will spend some time doing the rounds in the court.

I'm just happy that we won't be having (too much) haggling and "buying" of MPs. I never was a fan of UPA or NDA. One looks to please non-hindus while the other looks to please hindus. Both have their main leaders from lands far away. Both have a real lack of progressive ideology - the Congress ideology being "do whatever it takes to be power").

Well, this time the UPA don't have any excuses (read CPIm) to blame for any lack of progress and development.

Cheers to India and thanks for all the fun (and fish?)!