In Malerkotla, nominees promise voters completion of long-pending works

Besides trying to allure voters through monetary benefits and expensive gifts, candidates contesting panchayat elections and their supporters are wooing them by assuring to get their long-pending issues resolved by senior functionaries in the administration.

Favour in police cases, waiver of penalties, allotment of fair price shops, amendments in revenue records, transfer of ownership rights and selection as lambardar are among the issues being promised resolution immediately after polling, which is scheduled to take place on October 15.

Senior functionaries, on the other hand, are upset over the tendency of candidates and their supporters, including leaders of various political parties, calling up at odd hours, even on holidays. Government personnel feel even worse when the callers are drunk and continue passing on calls from one person to another.

Acknowledging this tendency, senior functionaries, including gazetted officers, said candidates owing allegiance to various political parties had tried to get political mileage by frequently calling them up at odd hours and taking assurances regarding issues which were not even related to them.

In the majority of cases, the conversation was “broadcast” on speakerphone to impress a group of voters, said the government personnel.

“What is more upsetting is that candidates or their supporters use informal language to make the voters believe that they are intimately related to us,” said a revenue officer, lamenting that the majority of such calls were received late in the night.

Harvir Singh Dhindsa, former president, Punjab Revenue Patwar Union, acknowledged that revenue personnel received the maximum number of calls regarding immediate redress of long-pending issues. “As almost all voters are directly or indirectly related with some peasant family, candidates boast of being related to revenue personnel and call them up for assurance to get the voter’s job done,” said Dhindsa, maintaining that all call were responded to in the positive to get the work done immediately after the polling day.

Dhindsa affirmed that in most cases, the caller claimed to be “PA” or “OSD” to some elected representative in Assembly or Parliament. “In some cases, the caller cautions us about his call in advance and informs us that he is going to put the call on speakerphone,” added Dhindsa.

Some regional leaders are said to have amended their contact lists by saving phone numbers of their own contacts in the name of senior functionaries in different departments, including the police and banks. “As bank personnel usually don’t accommodate politicians or leaders, we try to impress on our workers and voters by making calls to our own people pretending to be the officer concerned,” conceded a local leader.