While the increase or decrease in the vote share of political parties is a matter of routine, the most worrying finding of the survey is that people have relegated corruption to the fourth or fifth place as an election issue. There can be only two reasons for this.
One, the masses have reconciled themselves to the fact that corruption is an essential ingredient in government functioning and cannot be eliminated no matter which party rules. Two, they are not able to correlate the impact of politico-bureaucratic corruption to their day-to-day life in the absence of any effort to educate them.
Nirmala Misra,
Allahabad
Voters behave differently in elections to Parliament and the State Assemblies. Major issues in the Lok Sabha election will be the UPA misrule, food inflation, corruption, black money, economic slowdown, unemployment, lack of basic amenities, rise in crimes against women, internal security, foreign policy failure, interference in CBI cases, devaluation of constitutional authorities and parliamentary committees and, above all, performance of MPs rather than the performance of State governments and image of Chief Ministers.
V.M. Muralidharan,
Karumalloor
