Ticket-hopefuls shift homes to meet Cong selection norms

NEW DELHI, October 16: The Congress high command had informally made it known that all November 25 election ticket-aspirants will have to...

NEW DELHI, October 16: The Congress high command had informally made it known that all November 25 election ticket-aspirants will have to actually reside in constituency they hope to contest from. Though there is nothing official about it yet, ever since word got around a fortnight ago, at least four ticket-hopefuls have been moving home and hearth to fulfil this criteria.

Prominent among the Congress movers are Anjali Rai, S.C. Vats, Kiran Chowdhary and Ram Vir Bidhuri. Anjali has shifted her residence from Kirti Nagar (from where she lost five years ago) to Paharganj (from where she hopes to contest this time). And so have Bidhuri (Tughlakabad to Sarita Vihar), Vats (Rana Pratap Bagh to Shakur Basti) and Kiran Chowdhary (Friends’ Colony to Delhi Cantonment).

By inserting the residents-only criterion in the process of ticket distribution, the Congress hopes to scupper criticism that `outsiders’ are being foisted as candidates. There is a widespread belief within the party that Ajay Maken, R.K. Dhawan and Sheila Dixit lost last February’s Lok Sabha elections because they were not residents of the constituencies they contested and, therefore, did not have the unqualified support of grassroot-level workers.

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State unit president and East Nizamuddin-resident Sheila Dixit should, by this criterion, contest the Minto Road seat but it is unlikely that incumbent MLA Tajdar Babbar can be easily persuaded to contest from somewhere else.

Says mover Anjali Rai: “There may be so-called residents who will get elected and forget about the constituency. There may be so-called outsiders who will work hard in the constituency.” She justifies her making Paharganj her new home saying her family had contested from the area earlier.

Kiran Chowdhary explains her two addresses.“My husband’s house is in Friends’ Colony but I have been living intermittently in Delhi Cantonment for the last 25 years. I have moved back to my Delhi Cantonment home”.

In a related development, the Shakur Basti Block Congress Committee submitted a memorandum to the Congress national president Sonia Gandhi protesting against Vats’s public claim that he had been assured the Shakur Basti ticket. (He had contested the last Assembly elections from Shalimar Bagh and lost to Sahib Singh Verma). The petition said: “Vats stays in Rana Pratap Bagh (which is about 10 km from Shakur Basti). He has a clinic in the area. Thrusting an outsider on the people of Shakur Basti would be a grave injustice”.

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Bidhuri says his shifting his home to Sarita Vihar in Badarpur from Tughlakabad did not pose any problem as far as getting his name on the Badarpur voters’ list. “If you want I can get your name on the voters’ list changed in a day,” he promises.

On the link between his new address and his chance of getting the Badarpur ticket, he says: “Nothing of the sort. I wanted to be with my people, my people wanted me to be with them.” What he failed to explain was how he discovered that his `people’ want him to be with them.