Doing some final checks before I finalize the candidate I would be voting for in tomorrows election. Just visited the websites of all the top candidates to check if they have something new to say. Nothing new there. A couple of sites seem to have actually gone down. Next looking at http://myneta.info/pune for a quick and easy to read synopsis of the affidavits filed by the Pune Loksabha candidates. The details of 3 candidates including BJP’s Anil Shirole are missing from the sheet.
I see that Mr. D S Kulkarni with 29 crores is the richest followed by Mr. Bhatia at 22 crores. The sitting MP Mr. Kalmadi comes in at 3rd place with 12 crores. However looking at how most politicians across India have blatantly hidden their wealth in their affidavits, can’t assign too much importance to this. However if a candidate seems to have obviously hidden his assets, then that does raise some question marks about the person.
8 of the candidates are post graduates. The oldest candidate is a 80 years old, Mr. Chavan. 4 candidates (Shri. Amanulla Khan, Shri. Kalmadi, Shri. Sardesai and Shri. Boke) have criminal cases against them. All 4 have cases where they are the accused; fortunately no candidate has any convictions against him/her.
A majority of the candidates are independents who I have never heard of. I can understand small parties fielding candidates in an attempt to strengthen the party and build their cadres. However I can’t quite figure out why independents with seemingly no chance of winning, contest the elections. Wouldn’t they be better off contesting local or state polls?
Ok. so now I pretty much know and have checked up all that I need to decide who will serve my and Pune’s interests best. I hope you the reader have also studied the candidates in the fray and are deciding based on who will serve you and Pune best and not because many generations of your family have voted for party X or Y. You definitely should vote for X or Y if they have a candidate that you think is the best, but not for any other reason.
