If these results are anything to go by....

With the shenanigans that the CONgress party and its allies have been perpetrating at all levels of governance, there was always a discussion on somewhere about what it does to the poll fortunes of this sycophantic political party. If anything, there is something which I will always admit the CONgress never lacked, and that is their arrogance and quick dismissal of anything remotely critical of them.

I am sure the fraud Gandhi family and their minions around them are planning to shift power at the center of what was the Government of India - now its the Government of the Banana Republic of India - to bring Raul Maino at the helm, but surely the results that came out in the past few days, not just from one state, but from Haryana, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Three of these seats were Assembly seats and the one in Hisar, Haryana was the Lok Sabha seat vacated upon the death of the former Haryana Chief Minister, Bhajan Lal. According to the Business Standard:

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s failure to win not even one of the four by-elections — one Lok Sabha and three Assembly seats — has set off alarm bells within the ruling alliance.

In Bihar, UPA ally Rashtriya Janata Dal lost the Daraunda constituency in Siwan district by a convincing 20,000 margin, enabling the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) to retain the Assembly seat. In Maharashtra, the blow was sharp and deep.

Although all parties in the ruling UPA have gone into a huddle following the current setback, they say it is just a set of by-elections. But in three out of four states, the party in power is the Congress.

Election season in India is clearly showing signs of coming in full force now, and much to the chagrin of CONgress and its allies, Anna Hazare and his team have been pretty active in campaigning against CONgress, including in Hisar, which happens to be Arvind Kejriwal's native place. The Hindustan Times asked on the 11th of this month whether Mr. Hazare and Mr. Kejriwal will be able to influence the outcome?

In fact, the writer, Vinod Sharma, is very critical of what Mr. Kejriwal and Mr. Hazare have been doing in Hisar, which he says, is based on misrepresented facts and false claims. Mr. Sharma, of course, is a known CONgress boy and hence can be expected to be vexed to see so much support for the people campaigning against the CONgress, and apparently, seem to be winning.

Apparently there is a spin in the media these days to show that Team Anna is losing its plot and are losing their support by becoming more political and on many occasions, unabashedly anti-CONgress. There was a shoe hurled at Arvind Kejriwal recently by a man named Jitendra Pathak in Lucknow. I haven't read all the accounts, but the article I just linked from IBN Live is enough to tell me that there was definitely something fishy in that shoe throwing.

The attempted attack came a day after the drubbing Congress party got in Hisar by-poll and a few days after the attack on Prashant Bhushan and Anna's supporters.

There is some ambiguity about the affiliation of the man, Jitendra Pathak, who attacked Kejriwal. He is known to be close to the BJP and has also appeared in many of Congress's rallies.

Pathak said, "I attacked Kejriwal because he said he had come to speak about corruption but then never addressed the issue."

So Jitendra threw the shoe because Team Anna only speaks about corruption but never addresses the issue. Everybody else believes its political but nobody seems to know what is affiliations are, his uncle believes he used to work for the BJP, and this comes after Prashant Bhushan supported a referendum in Kashmir and was slapped in his office for saying so!

IBN Live is not without putting in its parting shot in the article to create some sort of a propaganda among its readers, as it tries to create a spin that Hazare and the people around him are crumbling.

Team Anna caught the nation's imagination by creating strong emotions against the government. Now it seems the same emotion is turning against them even if it's at a small level.

I just love how news stories put their own opinions into their pieces and then pass it off as news. That's the trend now and with the way media is controlled today by the rich and powerful, its no wonder that the media is now so sensationalist and yellow. I am saying this to simply illustrate that this is why I will take what they write with a barrel of salt. Today, for example, the news sources are reporting that Mr. Prasad now says that he will give a "similar treatment" to Anna Hazare. This time the issue is that Mr. Hazare must clear the air on Prashant Bhushan's Kashmir remarks. I suppose he is also upset that Hazare is now more explicit in campaigning against the CONgress, as opposed to campaigning against something as universal as corruption. That smell of bulls**t in the air is just nauseating.

I feel there is a confusion in many minds about what the central theme of whats going in. Anna Hazare brought up corruption in the government and the people rallied with him. So the main issue is corruption and now no matter what Hazare and his team does, the hope would be that the people's awareness towards the absolutely unbelievable levels of greed and avarice in the current Government has risen that their demand for justice can sustain itself. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and more often than not, to kill the issue, one has to kill the messenger. By discrediting Hazare and digging up his past and implicating Arvind Kejriwal in old tax cases, just to give examples, are ways by which the government is using the vast machinery at its disposal to get back at the people who oppose it.

Of course, since elections are in the air, that has been gaining the maximum coverage in the media, but once in a while the issue of election reforms also comes in. There is still a big discussion on about the various aspects of election reforms such as the right to reject or the right to recall, and there are opinions from various stakeholders including the Chief Election Commissioner of the India saying that Right to Recall will lead to destabilisation of the country, the Right to Reject is a more easily adoptable idea. He makes a valid point though - "everywhere there is discontent, people will start recalling their representatives." Since this nation is a nation of discontent, I am imagine that will happen very frequently.

So I do not know whether Hazare's strong words against the CONgress will work and whether it was his campaign or cast politics which lost CONgress the Hisar seat. However, I do sincerely hope that with so many elections coming, people will actually be more aware and vote for change. I simply can't shake my belief that this country and society has a government and representatives that it deserves. Till our society, especially the democratically inactive part, stop blaming the ills on everybody else and be more active in demanding what is right, we won't get it.