Elections in India - The onlooker's perspective

Disclaimer: I wrote a series of articles for an online magazine called Cheers between 2004-2006, am putting them out here since I found them in Lockdown 2.0

Elections in India - The onlooker's perspective

‎20 ‎April ‎2004, ‏‎10:55:18

This was the time in our childhood that we used to get weeklong holidays since our school was the polling booth from the time of its existence.  The awareness well was very limited (even to my fathers generation) about the politics of parties and governments.  Although we belonged to the "elite-educated" class we never knew who even was standing from our constituency.

Things have really changed over the years I still remember the time when our young rebel Prime Minister "Rajiv Gandhi" who reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.  I immediately was eligible for voting and that increased the voting population by 20% in India.  Well look at 20% of Indian population (93 million) that time.  Quite a huge number for the benefit of Congress, for which he was the leader.  He was the role model for all youngsters and we did not keep quite when the opposition party in power did something wrong with reservation policies.  The whole country woke up with Rajiv Gandhi leading the moment to pull down the opposition party government.  He was a true student leader, sadly assassinated (fruit of his own mistake though).

Now the elections are not just a game reserved to politicians and governments, finally it has trickled down to the voters.  It's now seen as a glamorous profession (with due respects to the movie stars turned politicians!!) with lots of credits and good will of people.  All political parties to propagate their agenda and woo voters like any other FMCG company have used the mass media generously.  Not just in cities even in rural areas where all you had to do to get votes was just a bottle of arrack and some cash now demands drinking water and electricity.

My mother went out this year to organize a small kitty party and invite the local candidate who according to her will help solve her problems with the service lane next to our house.  She was as unaware of politics till few years back as the maid in the house.  But thanks to mass media which has succeeded in opening eyes of all of us at least the households who can afford TV (according to last national survey by a private media house 40% of one billion people watch TV in India).

The highly targeted campaign of current ruling party BJP - "India Shining" targeted by all other parties as abuse of government money led to these parties go to court against the ruling party.  This never had happened in Indian history, since all these years it was the same public money which ruling governments used to spend for their propaganda.  Truly India is shining!!

Just to add technology into the perspective EVM's (Electronic Voting Machines) are introduced this year for rigged free polls.  There were instances in all elections where political party goons had captured booths and of the ten such cases only five used to be rectified and would go in for re elections.  Not even US still has this technology available for their voters to select their leader.

Ending with what happened on a popular talk show on TV where Collin Powell was being interviewed by audience consisting students, businessmen etc. one of the enthusiasts after Powell was convinced of the fact that elections are not what they used to be earlier made a suggestion to US "why don't u OUTSOURCE US election work to India".  As I said earlier India sure is shining!

P D Sathish Chandra