Beneath the discarded festoons constituency’s problems fester

Vanaja* was cursing her luck as she cleared the street of plastic flyers in Vinobha Nagar, a residential locality in Dr Radhakrishnan Nagar assembly constituency on Tuesday.

Only hours earlier, DMK working president M K Stalin had passed through the street where Vanaja lives. He was canvassing for his party’s candidate Maruthu Ganesh. “Who do they (politicians) think will clean up?” she said.

Like Vanaja, residents of RK Nagar had been frustrated by the lack of campaign material that touched upon issues concerning residents. “Voters in this constituency do not question the candidates and the politicians use this to their advantage,” said Ganesan Perumal of Kodungaiyur.

The apathy is evident in the blatant flouting of guidelines issued by the Election Commission of India with respect to use of plastic for electioneering. RK Nagar, over the past two weeks, generated so much plastic and non-biodegradable waste that Greater Chennai Corporation had to press into service special conservancy teams to pick up the trash.

“In each ward, at least 500kg extra plastic waste has been collected every day for the past two weeks,” said a conservancy worker. RK Nagar comprises 11 wards.

“Several election agents had camped on the streets. All of them bought large food parcels from nearby hotels and consumed the food on thermocol plates which were then left on the streets. There are also the countless plastic cups from consuming tea,” the worker said.

For C Karthik of Tondiarpet, this type of campaigning sets a dangerous precedent. “A change of mindset among the political class should happen. Looking at the plastic trail these candidates have left behind, it is clear that environment or people’s issues are immaterial to them,” he said.

With the political careers of a few heavyweights hinging on the result of the bypoll, it was always expected that campaigning would only touch base with the political factors, said author Gnani Sankaran. “In their desperation to win, candidates turn indifferent to issues of the people. We witnessed this trend more recently in the Gujarat polls where once the Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered the fray, the issues of local residents were put on the backburner,” he said.

While residents like Perumal felt aggrieved that the voters had been toyed with and taken advantage of by politicians throwing money at the economically disadvantaged, D Ravikumar, VCK spokesperson, said this type of campaigning was not new to Tamil Nadu.

“It is dangerous to electoral democracy. But candidates have become larger than life characters and there has been a general tilt towards campaigning purely on the back of their cult of personality image. The BJP and Modi’s parliamentary election victory in 2014 was achieved in this manner,” he said.


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