Elections are no more a serious business of electing responsible government to legislate, rather are reduced to a tedious exercise of stitching up alliances
Deepak Laad
Now that the election commission has announced dates of parliamentary elections, there will be performance profusion at the massive rallies with candidates pillorying their opponents and thrilling the audience with promises galore. The ruling dispensation will do number crunching to gloat over increased employment, enhanced investments in industries, fallen crime rates that will baffle statisticians from the respective fields and appal citizens having above average IQ.
In reality the house functions with active participation of some forty odd active members from the government and the opposition side. The rest of the lot from treasury side is normally seen thumping the benches in glee when the ministers outwit and score over the opposition members and those with opposition marching to house-well flourishing placards and shouting slogans.
They are occasionally required to say ‘aye’ or ‘nay’ when bills are put to vote.
A third of the members of parliament have criminal cases against them including those of crimes against women, violence and arson. Both BJP and Congress field tainted candidates, with their eyes wide open.
‘Clean politician’, almost sounds like oxymoron. This species is nearing extinction. It is convenient for the party to field street muscles because they invest their own funds in the elections expecting future returns and do the campaigning in their own ways to ensure a win to safeguard their investment. The party does not have to bother about giving them funds or spend time campaigning for them. The Election Commission of India (EC), an autonomous constitutional authority responsible for administering election processes, expects the candidates to play the election games by the rules in the book which are otherwise observed more in breach. Here is a laughable, weird mandatory requirement. It is compulsory for the candidate to come clean about their criminal antecedents three times during electioneering in ‘widely’ circulated newspaper and on ‘popular’ TV channel. Now the ‘widely’ and ‘popular’ have been left open ended. Are the majority voters really bothered in the criminal present or the antecedents of their would-be representative? Every party has its own rogues. We saw Shiv Sena MP beating up the airways employee with sandals, in full public view, in a plane. Very recently we saw an enraged ruling party MP from UP hitting his own party’s MLA on his head with sandals not once or twice, but at least ten times.
Expectedly, what followed these incidents were punny reactions and stark inactions.
As there is a large number of ‘criminal’ candidates in every political party, each one of them will have to set aside a sizable amount to advertise and introduce their own ‘rogue gallery’ to voters.
In the past voters were enticed by candidates in voting for them by offering largesse like dhotis, sarees and towels. Times have changed. Voters feel ashamed no more to insist on hard cash and the candidates do oblige willingly as this commodity is easier to transport around and distribute. Our moderately literate candidates may not know much about economy or monetary theories but are experts where generating black money and stashing it is concerned. There was enough black money in play during UP assembly elections, held close on the heels of DeMo. Last year’s Karnataka assembly elections campaigns were ‘money guzzler’ exercises. Parties have spent total Rs 9000 crore to Rs 10000 crore as per the reports of research organization based on inputs from field operatives, field functionaries and media reporters. The EC can do precious little in such matters. The EC has cautioned against using picture of armymen on posters. But a candidate moving around in his constituency wearing army fatigue and carrying toy gun or a party poster only depicting the trade mark moustache of Abhinandan can say a lot more and yet get around EC diktats.
Now they say Income Tax department is going to track the suspicious transaction during election time. They only scratch the surface, the history has shown. How much of the lakhs of crores of black money that came in the banking channels or invested in real estate and gold during DeMo has been unearthed by them so far? They should be able to dig up at the least Rs 2 lakh crore of tax evaded stash , if only are asked to concentrate here and forget about the elections.
Ethics in politics have gone out of the window for long now. These are the times for the political birds to migrate. You will see strange bedfellows as date of filing nominations nears. Some bizarre illogical explanations are proffered when ticket-denied disgruntled element leaves party to join the rival.
Media covering elections in free and fair manner is now a thing of the past. Today the print and visual media manifest journalism with varying shades of yellow. The moderators on TV debates are no more neutral. They are mostly seen propping up the debaters from ruling dispensation to lambast opposition sympathizers. In the debates the language is foul and full of vitriol. Tempers run high and sometimes participants almost come to exchanging blows.
Elections are no more a serious business of electing responsible government to legislate and run the administration of the country, rather are reduced to a tedious exercise of stitching up alliances- mostly unholy- to usurp power to ‘rule the country.’
