Dawdling Democracy 1

2009 will play host to the 15th lok sabha elections. Mercifully, the UPA lasted its whole tenure of 5 years, quite contrary to the expectations. One of the things we Indians are good at is drawing room politics [cricket is at the top, but with India doing well in New-Zealand, that is on the backburner ] & with that come some very cliched arguments/statements vis-à-vis

1.Nothing can be done. India & her politicians will never change.
2.If you want change, why don’t you do something? Join politics or the cilvil services. Change the system!
3.As you vote, so shall you reap.

My thoughts:
@1: Not true. As they say change is the only constant. Esp.in the couple of years, a lot has happened, we are more positive than before & this optimism is borne out of some good stuff that has occurred in the recent past.

@2: What is being said is right. But the success rate of this theory is very bad. You join with the zeal to change, but at the time you retire, you are happy to have made it through without compromising on your principles. And this is the positive aspect, most of the ppl, “adapt” to survive or simply give up. And if you take pt. 2 to heart, everybody will be on the ruling side & the whole funda of “representation” goes to the dogs! Right now I have no control on the selection of my representative. I might agree with the principles of one party but might have to go with another one just because they fielded a candidate with better morals/scruples.

@3: NOT TRUE AT ALL. It’s more like “As you vote so shall you weep”. No matter how we vote, we are always on the loosing side…exasperation is the reason for the low voter turnouts. And I am pretty sure you are going to quote statement 2 to me, right about now. yup, it’s a vicious circle *sigh*.

How about an alternative…?
Why don’t we have the negative vote? A NO vote. Right to rejection, if you will. Election by elimination [hey, it’s even catchy!]. If we can have negative marking in almost all the selection exams, why not here?

Here is a rough sketch. We have the right to reject any candiate. Any candidate getting a certain percentage of NO votes cannot be allowed to contest in the present & the next election, infact he cannot be part of the present event in any form [no coalitions etc.]. This will give the ppl an option of saying no if they do not him, forcing the Political Parties to put up better candidates in the first place. Slowly we can eliminate those nincompoops .

The only flaw is that this would be most effective in a two party system[US,UK], though if you think about it a two party system would be way better than the multi party system we have now. In the end there are only two sides. Most of the parties join together to form a coalition anyway[if you can call it that. Definition: an alliance for action. Well they are more pro towards inaction, as the left adequately proved this time.]

What I am saying is that we will have control over our representation. We will influence the representative selection rather than only the selection of the party. I bet that there would be a quantum jump in the voter turnout when you introduce this. Why choose lesser of two evils when there should’nt be any evil? Right now we do not have a “bad” on our feedback form. The NO will shake the powers out of their reverie. More power to the ppl!