Carrying on with the legacy of her late husband Jaspal Bhatti to satirise political events, theatre personality Savita Bhatti, through her Nonsense Club, carried out a spoof and floated the ‘NOTA party’, a few hours before it was curtains-down for campaigning for the lone Lok Sabha seat in Chandigarh and the 10 in Haryana, where polling is scheduled on April 10.
Ms. Bhatti who was allotted a ticket by the Aam Aadmi Party withdrew from the contest. The AAP then fielded former Miss India Gul Panag for the Union Territory. Ms. Bhatti and members of her club reached the main shopping plaza in sector 17 of the ‘City Beautiful’ to announce they had “stolen” the ‘None Of The Above’ provision of the Electronic Voting Machine for their party, which had adopted wad of currency notes as its election symbol. However, she was evasive to queries about any suggestion to people to use the NOTA option during the forthcoming polls.
Holding placards reading “Divide corrupt and honest” and “Vote for NOTA party”, Ms. Bhatti’s group parodied a Bollywood song, “NOTA party sone ki, eh duniya pittal ki ...(NOTA party is made of gold, but world is made of metal)”.
She announced that anyone who was named in a scandal of at least Rs. 200 crore or had not less than 25 criminal cases against him or her was eligible to join the party, which did not believe in manifestoes.
Ms. Bhatti wondered that when every party in the present elections was promising to root out corruption, “where would the corrupt go? So we have provided them a platform”.
In a scenario when shoes were hurled, ink was splattered and leaders were being slapped every now and then, the NOTA party would hire the services of the WWE wrestlers and bouncers of discotheques to learn latest techniques in self defence.