Close encounters of the electoral kind

With elections scheduled to be held on Thursday in Vidarbha, this region is expected to see some close electoral encounters.
Leaders and workers from the two major alliances - the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party-Republican Party of India (Athavale) and the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena - are sweating it out in the heat and dust. The presence of Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party has only raised the temperature in some constituencies.
Vidarbha's mandate is pretty hard to predict save for a couple of constituencies. For the record, state BJP president Nitin Gadkari and his Congress counterpart Manickrao Thackre, are both claiming absolute success for their respective alliances.
In 2004 polls, the combine lost 10 of the region's 11 seats to its saffron rival but things look a little better this time. "The Congress is not cocksure about eight of the 10 seats. It underlines the undercurrents that are involved in most contests," said a senior Congress leader who was recently on the campaign trail in Vidarbha.
Not everyone agrees with the above assessment. "The Congress is in a bad state in Vidarbha," said Yadu Joshi, a senior journalist based in Nagpur. "If it does not do something drastic, that alliance could end up losing in eight seats. Except for Wardha and Nagpur, no constituency looks safe for the Congress-NCP."
Shriniwas Khandewale, a social activist who advocates a separate state of Vidarbha, agreed. "I don't expect 2009 to be greatly different from 2004. The socio-economic state has worsened and this discredits the Congress-NCP," he said, referring to the suicides by a number of impoverished farmers.
The assessments notwithstanding, the BJP-Sena too cannot smile all the way due to various reasons. The most important is the caste factor. "Caste and communal combinations are against us in Akola, Nagpur, and Gadchiroli," said a senior BJP leader, "The contests are expected to be triangular and the third candidate, who is either by BSP or an RPI faction, could play a decisive role for or against us."
In Nagpur, six-time Congress MP Vilas Muttemwar is against the BJP's Banwarilal Purohit. Nagpur has traditionally been a Congress bastion and the only time the BJP won it was in 1995 when, incidentally, it had fielded Purohit. Though Muttemwar has the edge here, there are worries. After the delimitation, Nagpur has lost a major chunk of its Muslim population, who mostly back the Congress.
Moreover, Nagpur has a sizeable Dalit population, which may vote for BSP candidate Manikrao Vaidya or for Dalit scholar and litterateur Yashwant Manohar, who is contesting for RPI.