At the peak of India Against Corruption campaign(I will not call it a movement) the cartoons of Aseem Trivedi became the talk of India. Suddenly the Nation catapulted him to the status of a cartoonist. To I, Aseem Trivedi was just a poster maker, who managed to create something which went in line with a certain political ideology(anti-Congress and pro-BJP wave). They were eager to hail and spread anything which Aseem Trevedi was creating at that time. Only condition being : The creation would had been in-line with that certain political ideology.

Hence, there's wrong to read much into these posters. They are simply a quick mash-up of some prevailing political situation, with the aim of supporting one political ideology and provoking the other. They may be able to cause some unrest among the rival political ideology; but beyond that they don't mean anything. In short, such creations are simply posters and not cartoons; as cartooning is a fine art.

That said, all through Yesterday, the TV News Channels in Uttarakhand remained bustling with the reports of certain posters surfacing in Dehradun early Saturday morning that showed BJP chief Amit Shah in search of "three MLAs who could be purchased,".

The poster shows a caricaturised Shah carrying a bag full of currency notes and holding nine ropes to which nine goats are tied. The nine Congress MLAs - Vijay Bahuguna, Harak Singh Rawat, Pradeep Batra, Shailendra Mohan Singhal, Subodh Uniyal, Shaila Rani Rawat, Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion, Amrita Rawat and Umesh Sharma Kau - are represented as the goats whose ropes Shah is shown as holding. The tag line of the poster says, "BJP ko zarurat hai 3 bikau vidhayakon ki" (BJP needs 3 MLAs who can be purchased).

The posters were pasted on walls in major areas of the city like the Parade ground, Suvery chowk, Tehsil chowk and Kanvali road ares of Dehradun city. The moment the information reached the Police, teams of policemen were seen removing the posters from the walls.

While the BJP termed it as the "cheap tactics" of Congress to target the party, the Congress categorically denied any association with the poster. Nevertheless, the party did not refrain from saying that "the sentiments expressed in the poster indeed reflected the feelings of the common man of Uttarakhand."

As expected, while the BJP blaimed the Congress for the posters; the latter denied any association with them, although quickly added that the posters do depict the true feelings of people of Uttarakhand. If the spokespersons of both the parties, Munna Singh Chauhan of BJP and Kishore Upadhyay of Congress, were allowed to speak all day on the issue, they would easily do so.

But the point is, such posters seldom portray the feelings of the common people of Uttarakhand. If that would have been the reality, then the Friday posters surfacing in Varanasi that showed the BJP's new UP chief Keshav Prasad Maurya as Krishna and Rahul, Akhilesh and Mayawati as Kauravas disrobing 'Draupadi' (UP), would surely be portraying the true feelings of common man of Uttar Pradesh. In that case 90 percent vote share would go to BJP. Which we know can never happen.

The posters in Dehradun can't be termed as "an undercover exercise of the Congress"; as if that be so, then the posters in Varanasi, might be the undercover exercise of BJP.

So lets not get swayed by such posters. They are instruments of short term political propaganda.

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