A T20 every day in race to win votes

GURGAON: Spanning the whole Lok Sabha constituency of Gurgaon in an election campaign is humanly impossible. There are 1,600 villages in the area, not to mention all the bigger towns and urban settlements to be found here. So how is a political campaigner, who is aiming for mass appeal before the general elections, to navigate this problem? One way is to wait for a teleportation machine to be invented.And the other, more practical approach would be to do what the INLD candidate from Gurgaon, Zakir Hussain, has been doing.
Hussain's main efforts to cover as large a part of this constituency as he can are supplemented by the several proxy campaigns that are being run in his favour by family, friends and political partners. "Abhay Singh Chautala has been holding public meetings. His son, Arjun has been working with us. My son is visiting towns and villages regularly. And my wife has already toured about 100 villages," Hussain said.
On an average day, over 20 villages are covered by Hussain and his ensemble, which includes the usual set of assistants and hangers-on, plus an armed bodyguard in khakis. By Wednesday afternoon, the entourage had reached the Sultanpur village, where a small marquee was installed under which some people sat listening. Although the venue was tiny and the crowd small enough to be addressed directly, person-to-person, Hussain preferred to use the megaphones installed at the top of one of his 4/4s.
His voice blared out, "The Lok Sabha election is the semi-final match. The final will happen when the assembly elections are held, and Chaudhary Om Prakash Chautala becomes the CM of Haryana."
Seldom does Hussain forget paying obeisance to the former-CM, jailed after being implicated in a teacher recruitment scam. And more and more, Hussain's campaign has come to appear like a warm-up act put together by INLD in preparation for the assembly polls.
Hussain calls Abhay Chautala his 'top star campaigner,' and claims the family is being unfairly targeted by the Congress. "The Congress managed to target Om Prakash Chautala in a false case. The documents were fabricate," Hussain said.
Spending 10 minutes at one stop during a political campaign is a luxury. So the campaign party is virtually mobile all the time. The village almost across the road Sultanpur, called Kheda Jhanjarola, was next on the itinerary.
Here, too, the marquee looked the same as the one used in the previous village. But the crowd was relatively smaller. Still, out came the microphone and Hussain's voice boomed another impassioned speech composed around the same lines. "My five generations have lived in the same house in Gurgaon. I and you have a lot in common," he said. No sooner had the speech ended than Hussain vanished back into the confines of his Toyota Fortuner. Perhaps because this particular SUV seems to symbolize two crucial parameters for political success in Haryana - status and muscle.