2014 Lok Sabha Elections thread |Exit poll results

[cowboysfan]

Seeing the EC's actions in the last few days' date=' either it is being pressured by Cong to do these things or it is seeing election trends which other people/organizations have not been able to see.[/quote'] What is the context here?

[Sachin=GOD]

What is the context here?

Millions of votes were missing from voting lists in Mumbai and other areas but almost nothing has been done. Rahul Gandhi was inside the polling booth near the EVM on election day (in Amethi) and EC, instead of taking action, is giving excuses for him. Everyone got permission for roadshows in Varanasi but BJP's rally was cancelled. Just some examples of how EC's conduct has been questionable.

[surajmal]

:hatsoff: Mindblasting figure: 234 million.

[surajmal]

It is an election about “vikas†and “parivartan†and Modi is seen as the magician who can make these things happen, with the flick of a wand, if he is given the chance to be the prime minister. Nobody else, not even the BJP without Modi, is seen as capable of bringing about the change that India’s first middle-class election wants. What is sad is that the only group of Indians who are not participants in this outpouring of hope and aspiration are Muslims. For them, the mood is sullen and scary. Wherever I have gone during the campaign, I have made it a point to seek out Muslims to understand why what happened in Gujarat in 2002 resonates so much more with them than more recent communal violence in Uttar Pradesh and Assam. I have stopped in small villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and asked why the absence of electricity, clean water and roads should not be as important to them as it is to their Hindu brethren and I have asked the same questions of mullahs in urban mosques. Everywhere, there has been a standard answer. Modi cannot be trusted because of what happened in 2002 and because more recently he refused to wear a Muslim skullcap when a maulvi offered it to him. Later, when I have come home and poured over my notes, I have been intrigued not just by the sameness of the answers but by how much harm Muslims could be doing themselves by remaining stuck in a time warp that could perhaps be no longer relevant. It is true that all our “secular†political leaders have used Modi to frighten Muslims into voting for them and this includes Kejriwal. It is also true that Modi has not worked hard enough to convince Muslims that he is not the monster they think he is, but there is a new element that I have detected in the Muslim mood in this election. Having spent many of my years as a reporter covering communal violence, I learned long ago to detect fear in a community and this time I saw no sign of it among the Muslims who said they would not vote for Modi. What I saw was something much more worrying and this was a sense of power. It was almost as if they knew that in the name of secularism they would always be important to a certain kind of political party and that this would be their weapon to remain relevant. There was something deliberate in their resistance to Modi’s “India first†idea and something sad about the way they seemed to need to make it clear that for them religion was always going to be more important than such things as vikas and parivartan. They admitted that they had been let down by the political parties they had supported but they said they were determined to not let this come in the way of their conviction that the BJP would never be there for them. So, mingled with the silliness and the political nonsense what we saw in the last days of this interminable campaign is the sad reality that an important section of India has not shared in the hope and excitement of this election. For this, every political party is to blame, both secular and communal.

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/fifth-column-election-redux/2/

[asterix]

^ I think it'll be wrong to generalise. There could be large numbers of Muslims who might've voted for NDA (including BJP) this time....

[hhunaeh]

THE TINDERBOX PROJECT - The BJP and the mainstreaming of majoritarianism

The most interesting — and insidious — aspect of this election is the mainstreaming of the sangh parivar’s principal belief: that India is a Hindu nation. The ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have consistently maintained that India as a nation ought to be defined by the culture and preferences of its Hindu majority and that minorities ought to defer to this idea of India as a Hindu nation state. The definitive statement on Hindu hegemony came from the second sarsanghchalak or supreme chief of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar: “...the non-Hindu people in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu Nation...†If they don’t, they “...may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens’ rights.†Golwalkar’s unambiguously Hindu supremacist position used to embarrass the Bharatiya Janata Party (not because of what he had said, but on account of the starkness with which he said it) and was often explained away by gesturing at its context — the politics of the 1930s when India was a colonized country, threatened by Muslim separatism. The implication was that the BJP had evolved ideologically and no longer wanted Muslims to be treated as helots in republican India. However, after the electoral defeat of 2009, as the party regrouped around its most polarizing leader, Narendra Modi, it became less shy about its Hindu supremacist project. One straw in the wind was the BJP’s admission of Subramanian Swamy, the sole proprietor of what remained of the Janata Party, into its ranks. In 2011, Swamy wrote an article in a newspaper that updated Golwalkar for the 21st century. This was his prescription: “Implement the uniform civil code, make learning of Sanskrit and singing of Vande Mataram mandatory, and declare India a Hindu Rashtra in which non-Hindus can vote only if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus. Rename India Hindustan as a nation of Hindus and those whose ancestors were Hindus.†Swamy joined the BJP soon afterwards in 2013 and he has been one of the BJP’s most visible spokesmen through this election season, a regular in news television’s panel discussions and a trenchant champion of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat Model. That a man who advocates the disenfranchisement of all Muslims who don’t acknowledge that they are basically lapsed Hindus should be treated as a respectable party spokesperson on prime time news tells you something about both the New Model BJP and the biases of the news industry. Try to imagine a Muslim advocating the assimilation of Kashmir into an Islamic caliphate, becoming a regular on ‘Left, Right & Centre’ or ‘The Newshour’ or ‘The Buck Stops Here’ and you begin to grasp the extent to which majoritarianism has been normalized by prime time television and its panel discussions. There is a curious consensus in both the print and the broadcast media that the BJP has replaced its traditionally communal agenda with a new emphasis on development and governance. Curious because a) there is no contradiction between a focus on economic growth and a commitment to Hindu chauvinism and b) in actual fact, Amit Shah and Praveen Togadia and Narendra Modi were happy to dogwhistle their Hindutva agendas right through their election campaigns. Thus Amit Shah, performing for a gathering of Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, attacked Mayavati for giving a ‘particular community’ (read Muslims) 19 tickets for the Lok Sabha elections in UP. Helpfully Shah suggested that Mayavati had allotted these seats to a community that violated the honour of his audience’s sisters and daughters. A few days later, after apologizing to the Election Commission for his political rhetoric, he was at it again: this time describing Azamgarh as a base for terrorists. Not to be left behind by his consigliere, the BJP’s prime-minister-in-waiting denounced the Congress for promoting meat export and cow slaughter. The Congress, he alleged, gave subsidies to those-who-slaughtered-cows. On another occasion, Modi expressed a marked preference for hosting Durga-loving Bengalis as opposed to Bengalis of any other sort, leaving us wondering who those others might be. Bengali Vaishnavs, perhaps, disinterested in the cult of a mother goddess? Calcutta’s Marwaris? Its Armenian Jews? Who? To everyone’s utter surprise, it turned out that Modi had been referring to Bengali-speaking Muslims, aka Infiltrators or Bangladeshis. Ever the man of action, Modi found new allies in his virtuous crusade against Bengali Muslims in Assam. After armed Bodos had killed a considerable number of Bengalis, Modi promised to deport the rest. Earlier in the election campaign, Modi made the important point that the Congress was killing rhinos to free up living space for Bangladeshis. This is not a secularist canard or some magical realist flourish, this is what he actually said: “Aren’t rhinos the pride of Assam? These days there is a conspiracy to kill them. I am making the allegation very seriously. People sitting in the government... they are carrying out this conspiracy to kill rhinos so that the area is made clear to settle Bangladeshis.†The fantasy of demographic extinction via mass immigration is a hardy staple of majoritarian right-wing politics everywhere, but casting rhinos as stand-ins for aboriginal Hindus is a novel touch. The BJP leadership’s concerted attempt to stigmatize Muslims as fifth columnists, infiltrators and predators has, predictably, turned Muslims against the prospect of a BJP government. Polls and other guesstimates often show Muslims voting en bloc against the BJP whereas the party captures a much larger share of the non-Muslim vote. This wholly explicable difference in Muslim and non-Muslim voting patterns has, by a strange sleight of hand, been read by pundits as a symptom of a condition that Marxists used to describe as ‘false consciousness’. Thus, while India’s other human species are seen to be voting for well-being and voting their aspirations, Muslims are simply voting their fears. And given that the BJP’s election campaign was branded early on as a non-sectarian pitch for growth and governance, these fears, it followed, were unfounded. Sadanand Dhume, who concedes that Muslims have reason to be wary of Modi, still sees Muslim opposition to the BJP as a kind of political outlier: “Viewed through the narrow prism of the Muslim community’s concerns, Mr. Modi remains a troubling choice to lead India. But apply an economic lens to the country as a whole — not just the Muslim minority that makes up 14% of the country’s 1.2 billion people — and the choices look different.†The problem with this judgment is that a minority community’s view of Modi is a ‘narrow lens’ only if you think that its predicament and its fears are irrelevant to Indians who aren’t classed as a religious minority. Except that they are, as even a cursory acquaintance with South Asian history will show. Thus, Sri Lanka’s majoritarian turn, where the Sinhala Buddhist majority made a bid to become the sole proprietor of the Sri Lankan nation state, led to endless violence and a bloody civil war which brought that country’s economy to a standstill for twenty years. The eager media consensus that sees Narendra Modi and Subramanian Swamy as agents of economic rationality and Indian Muslims as paranoid dead-enders is a grotesque inversion of India’s political reality. Given the BJP’s unremitting hostility towards them, Muslims are the rational actors here; not voting for a party that loathes you is a reasonable thing to do. Asking Muslims to admit that they are basically Hindus, on the other hand, isn’t. If a Modi sarkar were to act on Swamy’s supremacist fantasies or fashion Shah’s slanders into institutionalized suspicion or convert Modi’s dog-whistling into policy, India might well turn into a tinderbox. And if Indian newspapers and television channels continue to normalize extremist rhetoric into ‘common sense’, they will be remembered for having had a hand in sowing the wind.

[someone]

^^^^ What an argument. Like how infiltrators have become "Muslims settlers", so really who needs enemies when we have enough of our own who can go to any heights of hypocrisy. What's next, are terrorists going to supported by them? While there is a lot of biased articles about BJP, all the other parties are chasing the Muslims votes, and engaging in a completely fear mongering campaign. If we do make a comparison about this elections, BJP has run a far more "secular" campaign than all the rest of parties.

[hhunaeh]

^^^The article was posted in response to the one posted earlier. And as for bengali muslims, it seems not all of them are recent immigrants from bangladesh. A lot of them are supposedly here since 1900s, so it is not correct to call all bengali muslims immigrants as illegal aliens. And some of the bengali immigrants are supposedly hindu refugees too. So it is not easy to classify people like the bjp would have us believe.

[Yoda-esque]

:hatsoff: Mindblasting figure: 234 million.

One can see how efficient he is just by looking at his campaign

[Yoda-esque]

EC, UP Police teams raid BJP office in Varanasi on poll eve

[cндябеяs]

Officials said that the action was taken to seize election campaign material as it had got information about such items being sent in large quantity from the BJP office here in the Sigra locality, despite a ban on poll campaign in place. The party leaders countered this with claims that the unused products were being returned to their respective manufacturers.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/varanasi-lok-sabha-polls-2014-raid-at-bjp-office/1/360205.html as if manufacturers take back unused flags, t-shirts and campaign material

[coffee_rules]

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/varanasi-lok-sabha-polls-2014-raid-at-bjp-office/1/360205.html as if manufacturers take back unused flags, t-shirts and campaign material

Bad press gains sympathy votes!

[ravishingravi]

One can see how efficient he is just by looking at his campaign

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-modi-bjp-campaign-indian-electoral-history-lok-sabha-elections-2014/1/359920.html Probably the best campaign in our history

[JaiRamesh2]

Response to Congress' infatuation with chaddi organisation and remote control:

Meenakshi Lekhi said: “After any election, we meet people who helped us. Mr. Modi is from the RSS and he met them. Big Deal! At least our remote control is nationalist; not in Rome.”

No BS, no going in circles, a direct shot as it gets.

[asterix]

T - 4 days to a Kangress Mukt Bharat.... :aha:

[someone]

^^^The article was posted in response to the one posted earlier. And as for bengali muslims, it seems not all of them are recent immigrants from bangladesh. A lot of them are supposedly here since 1900s, so it is not correct to call all bengali muslims immigrants as illegal aliens. And some of the bengali immigrants are supposedly hindu refugees too. So it is not easy to classify people like the bjp would have us believe.

Well I am astonished. These are infiltrators, so I am not sure why you have to bring Muslims or immigrants. There is some great hypocrisy as you are now only looking for reasons to criticize Modi. What's next? You will say Naxal's are Indian people and should be protected and tolerated, much like your party who have several Naxal supporters.

[Yoda-esque]

Well I am astonished. These are infiltrators' date=' so I am not sure why you have to bring Muslims and immigrants. There is some great hypocrisy as you are now only looking for reasons to criticize Modi. What's next? Naxal's are Indian people and should be protected and tolerated, much like your party who have several Naxal supporters.[/quote'] Again, the word is delusional

[asterix]

When will the exit poll results starts coming in and which channel should I follow? Or should I just follow S!=Gs updates here? Request to MODs to unBAN the banned members so that they can comeback and discuss this major event... I hope they've learned their lessons...

[FischerTal]

When will the exit poll results starts coming in and which channel should I follow? Or should I just follow S!=Gs updates here? Request to MODs to unBAN the banned members so that they can comeback and discuss this major event... I hope they've learned their lessons...

i know timesnow is starting after 5 PM IST but listening to arnab bimari is painful to the ears. hopefully HT is conducting polls as well

[Yoda-esque]

Any updates on voting trends?