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Of net gains, and pregnant pauses...

Long after T N Seshan, as Chief Election Commissioner, had cracked the whip on the exuberance of political parties, introducing an element of sobriety in the serious affair of balloting, campaigning continues to be business-like.

This year too, it has been no different, with few flags, fewer buntings, no posters, no garishly painted cut-outs, no screaming graffiti and apparently no clear-cut winners emerging out of a hamstrung campaign for the 13th Lok Sabha election.

But like other elections, it has once again been dominated by personality-obsessed campaigning, with issues playing second fiddle. The burgeoning personality cult is best typified in a high-pitched, one-on-one duel between Sonia Gandhi, once the Delphic diva of 10, Janpath, who has since opted out of domestic confines to enter the untested waters of politics, and BJP powerhouse Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

With the personalities towering over the issues, it has also been a high-tech campaign, at least in urban areas, with the focus shifting from personalised meetings on street-corners to telegenic images and electronic messages from cyber-savvy leaders filtering into drawing rooms through television and, increasingly, the Internet.

Given the situation, it is not surprising that leading politicos of mainstream parties have hired the best image-makers to make themselves presentable, to keep an eye on their demeanour, sartorial elegance, and even mannerisms -- a well-timed pause, thus, could be more telling then flights of eloquence.

All this may appear to be on the lines of a presidential election in the US, but the fact is that fortunes of advertising companies in India are on the upswing.

Thus, if for Laloo Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the lantern symbol is a means to communicate with his rural audience, the websites of some BJP leaders are a technological prop in hawking Vajpayee's staple message of 'able leader, stable government' and 'tried, tested and trusted leader' to urban supporters.

The Congress, the CPI-M, the AIADMK and the Telugu Desam have also gone the website way to pedal their staples and zap the electorate.

To Kirit Somaiya (BJP-Maharashtra) and former Delhi chief minister Sahib Singh Verma, BJP nominee from Outer Delhi, go the credit of triggering netmania this time round. Though this constituency has a pronounced rural flavour, Sahib Singh has been tempted to reach the voters via the cyber route. And politicians of all hues have now begun imitating him. In fact, the BJP's website is the oldest one in the country. The Congress president's website wherein Sonia Gandhi promises answers to your questions is also being heavily touted.

Not to be outdone by their urban counterparts, nominees in the rural areas are using video films peppered with promises as a means of supplanting the more old-fashioned whistle-stop campaigning.

Indian elections have always been preceded by no-holds-barred campaigning. This year, however, the rhetoric appears to have touched rock bottom in personality bashing with sexist innuendoes, coarse expletives and the choicest of invectives flying around.

And it is Sonia Gandhi who has mostly been at the receiving end of the BJP rhetoric, with her foreign origin, inexperience, contribution or lack thereof and comparisons with some foreign personalities being turned into material for stump speeches.

With campaigning being reduced to a cacophony of inelegant adjectives, Vajpayee was constrained to ask his partymen not to indulge in Sonia-bashing but merely to harp on her foreign ancestry and political inexperience. The Election Commission had to intercede, with an appeal to parties to behave in a dignified manner and not to reduce the campaigning to street-level politics. Subsequently Pramod Mahajan, who was in the eye of a controversy for his alleged, and allegedly slanderous, remarks about Sonia Gandhi, said his remarks had been distorted by the media.

Another distinct feature of campaigning this time around is the aerial route taken by the major national leaders. For the last election of the Millennium, Congress and BJP leaders have turned to the helicopter as their main mode of commuting, while the BSP, Akali Dal, Telugu Desam AIADMK and the Biju Janata Dal have increasingly followed suit, hiring between them more than forty helicopters to criss cross their respective terrains.

Interestingly, in the last elections, Laloo Yadav had introduced the rustic touch by using pigeons to communicate with his rural audience.

Party-hopping is another feature of this particular election, and the Congress has been the hardest hit, having watched several of their bigwigs jettison ship till the process was stemmed by Sonia Gandhi.

The BJP for its part had its share of defections, and was kept on tenterhooks as a slew of local formations tried to join the National Democratic Alliance bandwagon without sacrificing their local clout. But it was the Third Front which lay in a total shambles as the Janata Dal, the mainstay of the front, split yet another time. The Left Front is also plagued by the incumbency factor and internal dissension, which is evident from the fact that the Forward Bloc and the RSP have released their manifestos for the first time since the formation of the Front in 1977.

But more than all these factors, it is Sonia Gandhi's entry that has electrified the otherwise listless campaign. The Congress, dejected and dis-spirited in the aftermath of its abortive bid for power at the expense of the BJP government, is now projecting her as not only the prime ministerial candidate but also the mascot and potential vote-catcher.

For the BJP, it is Vajpayee's suave image, reinforced by his penchant for liberal-pluralist policies, that is the main peg. There is a moratorium on all contentious issues, as announced by BJP leader Jaswant Singh on August 16. And the prime minister, in a bid to underline his liberal image, said at the time: "This is a first, very definite step. We will ensure that these issues are not raised."

But when all talk of issues is done, the bottomline is that it is all about Vajpayee versus Sonia. Forget the local issues, forget Kargil. This election is between the desi, homespun charisma of a popular national leader and a person who could not even learn an Indian language in 31 years of being a Gandhi bahu -- or so says the BJP.

Counters Sonia Gandhi: "By virtue of my marriage with Rajiv Gandhi, I am now a daughter of India. I shall love this country till my last breath."

Meanwhile, as the personality-centric campaign assumes shrill overtones, it is the logistics of the electoral exercise that assumes mind-boggling proportions: 615 million voters, over 4,500 candidates, 900,000 polling stations, five million staffers manning the entire exercise, with assistance from several hundred thousand police and paramilitary personnel.

"The Indian election is the mother of all elections -- a logistical nightmare. Six hundred million people - it's not a joke, it worries and frightens us," said the chief election commissioner, with a tinge of exasperation.

UNI

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