For the Badals, the path to success meandering through Bathinda villages may hit a roadblock in the urban areas. While the villagers are much too happy with abundant power and clean water, their counterparts in the city are visibly upset with the policies of the Parkash Singh Badal-led Government in Punjab.
Many here believe that sitting Akali MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal’s plans of wresting the Bathinda parliamentary seat once again required a lot of effort this time round.Facing parallel waves of anti-incumbency and resentment blowing against the incumbent Government in the State and the sitting MP, the electorate in the urban areas of Bathinda may play an instrumental role in deciding their representative for the lok Sabha.
Even as Harsimrat, in her first lok Sabha election, defeated the Congress candidate Raninder Singh, son of senior Congress leader Capt Amarinder Singh, by a margin of 11,000 votes, the challenge is tougher this time in Congress supported PPP candidate Manpreet Singh Badal.
There is no denying the fact that the Akali Dal has a stronghold over the rural areas, and considering Bathinda, the home constituency of the Badals, support to them is inevitable. But, with another leader from the Badal clan - Badal’s estranged nephew Manpreet — in fray, it is expected that equations may undergo some change in the rural segment.
After having unsuccessful run during the 2012 State Assembly polls, the People’s Party of Punjab’s (PPP) chief Manpreet has joined hands with the Congress and is fighting on Congress symbol of “hand” as Congress-PPP combine candidate against his cousin and SAD chief Sukhbir Badal’s wife in a battle of prestige.
The hard feelings among the urban voters has come at a time when the SAD-BJP has all along been harping on carrying out tremendous development works in the constituency — something that the city-bred voters dubbed to be just on the surface. In Bathinda district, there are nearly two lakh urban voters out of the total number of 14.96 lakh in the entire district.
“The development is just on the face of it, and behind all this so-called development, the people are suffering badly. The poor drainage and sewerage system made residents’ life nothing less than a hell during rainy season… the roads are all dug up for laying sewer which is incomplete for almost a year,” said Pawan Kumar, a shopkeeper in Parshuram Nagar.
The residents in the urban area believed that the ruling combine provided facilities to its rural counterparts at their cost. Ravinder Singh, a resident of Adarsh Nagar, said that despite tall claims of state being power-surplus by the Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal, “power is still a problem here... it seems, the state is power surplus for villagers who were given uninterrupted supply while we face power cuts during peak summers”.
On the other hand, a fair section of electorates in most of the rural areas of the district are a satisfied lot, notwithstanding delay in ration under Atta-Dal scheme, pensions, compensation under Shagun scheme, they are standing by the Akali Dal as true loyalists.
Knowing well that the urban voters had voted against the alliance during 2009 lok Sabha polls and in favour of other parties, including Congress, the SAD-BJP is making inroads into the segment by banking on the name of NDA’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
Highlighting the achievements of the SAD-BJP combine in terms of making state power-surplus, setting up cancer hospital, installing reserve osmosis (RO) systems in all villages, improved health and education facilities, strengthening basic infrastructure and civic amenities in cities and villages, ensuring irrigation water for all, among other things, all the streets in the urban areas are donned up with Modi-Badal’s posters.
In fact, the party also launched a special campaign for urban segment under which the party workers distributed pamphlets and calendars bearing Harsimrat’s picture, along with senior Badal and Modi.As of now, the political observers believed that it is hard to predict in whose favour the wind would blow and whom it would swept off the feet in a battle of prestige between the two Badals.