Sir — Now, people will breathe a sigh of relief that at last the absurdly long campaign for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election has come to an end. The best that can be said of the Akhilesh-Rahul jugalbandi is that it managed to keep the Prime Minister pinned to Uttar Pradesh in the last leg of the campaign. Now, we hope that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues will return to New Delhi and start attending to the business of governance.
What is certain, regardless of the voters’ verdict, in Uttar Pradesh particularly, is that the ‘loser’ is decency. Apportioning blame is pointless; all entities are guilty of ‘murdering’ the system which the founding fathers of this nation strove hard to set up.
To query the functioning of the Election Commission is never salutary, but it proved how far it had strayed from the ‘Seshan standard’ by allowing the kind of bitter campaigning it did — that too through seven phases of agony in Uttar Pradesh.