1 April 2024
As political parties of various hues gear up for India’s 2024 General Elections, there is confounding confusion on many counts. Reliable sources say that the ruling party coalition, the Notionally Democratic Alliance (NDA), has sought an investigation into the naming of one of its offshoots, the Bharatiya Election Engineering Foundation (BEEF). Apparently, it had outsourced the formation of this entity as a Political-Private-Partnership (PPP), aimed at engineering the elections in a way that was (or at least appeared to be) completely above-board. Now the acronym, widely used by the media already, was leading to a lot of internal grumbling in the party. Not to mention disgruntlement amongst the otherwise loyal cadres of the ruling party’s foot-soldier organization, the Righteous Self-serving Society (RSS). Even as the party sought to contain the damage, a section of the party has recently split and formed the Yeh Bhi Janata Party (YBJP); It was planning to contest the elections chiefly on a ‘save the cow’ plank, alleging that the ruling party had betrayed its crucial, god-given mission.
Opposition parties have, predictably, gone to town over this faux-pas by the ruling party. The Kaun?gress Party spokesperson Jaishreeram Ramatgamatesh said: “this incident reveals the confused nature of the ruling party’s agenda.” He added, with his characteristic wit: “Along with all its other mistakes and deliberate promotion of religious hatred, which the people of India have woken up to, it will soon be reduced from ruling to ruing party.”
Left parties, about whom Prime Minister Harendra Monkeybaat has quipped that “they have been walking leftwards so long they’d ended up at the right (it is, after all, a round planet), and lost all sense of direction”, have found in the incident a new cause to rouse their comrades. According to the Confused Party of India (CPI) and the Confused Party of India – More (CPI-M), which claims to have more Marx than the former, this is only one of many mistakes and frauds that the ruling party is hoisting on the nation. Others, they stated, are the dubious contracts given to Larceny & Troubl-o (L&T) and the landgrabs that it has enabled for No-daani and Ambi-vani corporations.
The newly founded Indecisively Notional Democratic India Alliance (INDIA) has so far not offered any comment.
NGOs, gathered under the umbrella of Jan Sokar-Uthe, have said that the naming controversy is a dangerous diversion from the far more serious threat that BEEF itself poses to Indian democracy. Election engineering, they claim, is a polite term for distorting voter behaviour, spreading falsities about opposition parties, and trying to win votes using hyped up promises. They have also pointed to subversion of financial proprietary through the Electoral Bondage scheme, which was evidence of how government and corporations are joined at the hip.
The Minister for Home Affairs and Against Unmarried Home Affairs (MoHA’s new name), Omit Shahanshah, has threatened action against all opposition parties and NGOs for indulging in anti-national activities. Filing a case to reveal the buyers of Electoral Bondage shares was one proof of such activities, he said – it undermined the right to secrecy for all those who wanted to help the only party that could get India to superpower status, and therefore was an act against the nation.
The Election Cowmission of India has also warned all parties, and the citizens of India, not to indulge in any activities that would undermine the free and fair nature of the elections, including milking religious or cultural symbols for political advantage.
Carrying on the tradition of bovine politics, it is learnt that several parties are practicing singing ‘for he’s a jolly good bu-fellow’, in anticipation of winning the elections and seeing their supremo occupy the swanking new PM residence and office. It is not clear if those with women at the top, have a corresponding rallying song.
This reporter will be closely following the elections over the next two months, ruminating over the results. Though he has received threats from parties whose machinations he has exposed, he refuses to be cowed down.
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Ashish reports for the Press Trash of India (PTI). This story is an exclusive, based on several inside informants, whose names cannot be revealed. More facts they told him can be accessed at https://pti.BEEFexpose.com
