Bad to verse
With the word war going from bad to worse in these elections, the poets in Uttar Pradesh have taken to verse to vent their feelings. At a recent mushaira held in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a poet came up with a couplet that summed up the events of the past few months in the state.
The couplet read thus: “Mulayam teri chahat mein hum dar badar ho gaye/Apni hasti se hum bekhabar ho gaye. Tum sanwar kar sanam Sefai (Mulayam’s village) ho gaye/Hum bikhar kar Muzaffarnagar ho gaye.”
The couplet has become hugely popular and has gone viral on the Internet since it aptly sums up the contradictions of the Samajwadi Party and the UP government.
Since Mr Yadav is also contesting the Azamgarh seat in eastern Uttar Pradesh, his rivals are now preparing posters with this couplet to embarrass the Samajwadi Party president. Whoever said that you could not kill with words obviously hasn’t heard this couplet!
IMPure for sure?
Undeterred by the s
corching sun, Mamata Banerjee has been criss-crossing West Bengal seeking votes for the Trinamool Congress candidates in all 42 Lok Sabha constituencies. By nominating Tollywood stars like Dev and Moon Moon Sen and by making crowd-pullers like Mithun Chakraborty her star campaigners, Ms Banerjee thought she had won half the battle. Also, with the CPM in a disarray, the Congress demoralised, and the Bharatiya Janata Party failing to get its act together, the Trinamool looked confident of bagging a lion’s share of parliamentary seats.
When Ms Banerjee started crowing that she would get all 42 seats then as a bolt from the blue, the Saradha scam resurfaced with the arrest of Sudipta Sen’s son and wife by the Enforcement Directorate. Bereft of a potent poll plank, the CPM, the BJP and the Congress grabbled it like a godsend. Ms Banerjee who usually does not care about the heat and dust of the polls suddenly started getting singed by the flames of the scam.
Dreading the arrest of a Trinamul Congress leader, Ms Banerjee declared at a poll rally that hers is a poor party which detests tainted money. The chit fund scam has undoubtedly dented Ms Banerjee’s clean image as satotar pratik (symbol of honesty). Taking a dig at this manufactured image projection, her bete noire Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee quipped: “The symbol of honesty has now become the symbol of Saradha.” The thunderous applause that followed showed that the public is buying the Opposition charge. Too bad Ms Banerjee!
