The Hindu Business Line : Election campaigns

IT may not have been a day of celebration for the Election Commission when the Supreme Court placed on its head a crown of thorns, making it the monitor and the censor of campaign advertisements of political parties in the current election. In fact, the civility or the lack of it of parties and candidates has itself now become a campaign issue.

Well, everyone is edgy, and anything that smacks of a smear or a slight touches a raw nerve. At the same time, it is in part due to Indians, never famous for their sense of humour and gift of the cut-and-thrust of political discourse, take themselves too seriously, making sometimes pompous asses of themselves. The heat and dust of elections only make matters worse.

In longer-standing democracies, vitriolic verbal blows are common. Candidates give as much as they take, going as far down as possible to mine muck about their opponents. Campaigning in the UK and the US has always been, as many commentators have shown, "raw, cruel and personal". Rude retorts and repartees freely ricochet along the campaign trail and in representative bodies.

I recently came across some examples of the tirades exchanged between even the highly venerated founding fathers of the US on the electoral battlefields. They are so sulphurously pungent and shockingly lewd that I decided to censor them out of this piece, although I had initially included them as illustrations. Those who are curious about the extent to which the US founding fathers foundered can do no better than read the column "Are political campaigns getting nastier?" on the Web site encarta.msn.com.

Without holding any brief for character-assassinators, I still feel that we are too touchy over trifles. For instance, I found puzzling the hue-and-cry raised by the Gujarat Chief Minister, Mr Narendra Modi's disclosure that, in an apocryphal or actual survey, people considered Ms Sonia Gandhi and Mr Rahul Gandhi unfit for even the post of a clerk or a driver.

To me it was something not even worth giving a damn about, and deserved a sardonic chuckle at the most. After all, pooh-poohing the competence of contestants is part of the game. Sourpusses in politics interested in getting a bit of advice on developing a thick skin had better read William S. Bike's Winning Political Campaigns: A Comprehensive Guide to Electoral Success.