General Elections '09: Voters are wise & the winners!

I am very happy with the results of General Elections-09 of the Lok Sabha and AP Vidhan Soudha, which were declared yesterday. The voters in the entire country have voted wisely for stable governments and are the ultimate winners. I was afraid of a hung Legislative Assembly and hung Lok Sabha and the ensuing drama of coalitions, horse-trading, struggle for power, ministries, Chief Minister & Prime Minister positions.

Congress retained power in the State winning 157 of the 294 seats. They have won these seats against a united opposition and a new party with Cinema glamour, whose main aim was to dislodge congress from power by any means and at any cost. They criticized every action of the government on day to day basis, for five years. They have two newspapers working for them whose sole duty is to criticize the government and its policies through stories and cartoons and praise the opposition for whatever they did or said.  They offered all sorts of sops and freebies to win votes. They offered Color TVs, Rs. 2000/- a month for a large section of voters, food grains and oil for a family for just Rs. 100/-, free cooking gas and so on. These freebies are so attractive to the voters, yet for reasons best known to them they chose congress and brought them to power again. During the campaigning – road shows and rallies of Congress and other opposition parties, specially by innumerable film stars, crowds came in thousands to hear them. They watched them twirling their moustaches and striking their thighs, they heard their cinematic dialogues of anguish, anger and pleading in rhythmic style and finally ignored them and their parties on the day of voting.

At the center, Congress/UPA has won 258 of the 544 Lok Sabha seats. They just need the support of another 14 MPs to form government and many are willing to give this support. If Congress was not in such a comfortable position a Third and Fourth front each being supported by innumerable miniscule parties were getting ready to claim power. Each of these parties was talking of making their leader the Prime Minister. With such greed, with different political views and no specific program to run the country, such a possibility would have been disastrous for the country.

Now that the elections are over and have resulted in stable governments at Center and Andhra Pradesh, I hope the opposition and the media will cooperate with the government in doing its job and business without hindrance and unnecessary N O I S E!