Lok Sabha elections are round the corner and all the political parties are busy doing what they have mastered over the past six decades — pulling wool over the eyes of the electorate, creating confusion and dividing voters on the basis of caste, religion and region. We grew up being told that the British employed the ‘divide and rule’ policy to subjugate us. They may have, but our current politicians have honed it into an art form. Election after election, we fall for empty promises and vote the same bunch of worthless people to office.

Even the manifestos that they come out with on the eve of the elections look more like leaflets that flea markets use to advertise their bargains in an effort to attract customers, rather than documents outlining the parties’ intentions regarding governance. Party manifestos remind me of the popular song from a yesteryear film, Dushman, starring Rajesh Khanna, where he croons to a prostitute, played by Bindu, ‘Vade mein tere phool hai kum aur kante hai ziyada., Vada tera vada.... Vade pe tere mara gaya banda mein seedha sadaa.’ (Your promises have more thorns than flowers. Oh, your promises, how they’ve fooled a simpleton like me into believing them).

Our country suffers from lack of uniform infrastructure and facilities, but does any party manifesto speak of rectifying this? I was talking to Pankaj, a young man from Bihar. Pankaj hails from Khujri, a small hamlet under the Kanti police station in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar. Khujri does not have electricity. The irony is that barely a mile away from Kanti is a large thermal power plant belonging to the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). It is rightly said that there is always darkness under a lamp.

Khujri languishes in darkness in 2009, but have any of the manifestos talked about increasing power generation, so that not only our metros but each village and hamlet is provided sufficient electricity? No. They promise free rice, free colour TVs and so on. The irony of Khujri is that 20 years ago, electric poles were installed in the village and then forgotten. The rusty poles are still standing there and are being used in many ingenious ways, but not what they were meant for.

Khujri is not unique. There are thousands of Khujris where pipes have been laid and have rusted away without water, where primary health centres have been built and have turned into ruins without having provided a day’s health care, where primary and higher secondary schools catering to over 500 students function without drinking water and toilet facilities.

I visited a school 60 miles away from Bengaluru, the IT city. A young girl came up to me and said she would have to drop out of school that year because the one she was studying in had classes only up to standard VIII. The higher school was 10 km from her village and her parents had decided that they would not send their daughter to study that far. I talked to the principal, who told me that they had been applying to the education department to allow them to start classes till standard XII, but the department has denied permission saying they would not allow two schools within 10 km of each other to offer classes up to standard XII.

These are the issues that should be debated in the run-up to a general election. But once again, political parties are pulling wool over our eyes. Once again, they are diverting our attention, are dividing us and preparing to rule for five more years with impunity.

To add to all this, by giving a clean chit to Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has again proven that it is a discredited institution. Ask any Sikh in Delhi and they will accuse Tytler of being one of those who led the mobs during the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 (after Indira Gandhi’s assassination). All of them can’t be wrong. But, in an effort to please their masters, the CBI has allegedly allowed all the accused to slip away. It was CBI that let BJP leader L K Advani get away from the Jain havala scam. One fine day, it may well be that legally there will be no accused left to punish. Sonia Gandhi had the courage to apologise to the Sikhs for the riots. She must show the same resoluteness by expelling Tytler and Sajjan Kumar from the party and strip them of political clout making them vulnerable.