In the 2009 Lok Sabha election in Pune, there were 36 candidates that contested, of which 25 were independent candidates. A total of 25,701 people voted for these 25 independents but the highest vote share for a single independent candidate was just 3,088. The winner - Suresh Kalmadi defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s Anil Shirole by 24,768 votes. A mischievous question - had all the voters that voted for independent candidates instead together voted for Anil Shirole, would we not have had the Commonwealth Games scam? It is a mathematically silly, but a deliberately provocative question. Read more