Commoners’ whys
Train journeys are often very enervating. What with co- passengers having all the time in the world to pontificate on everything from Gul Panag.senchanting dimples to why English should not be the official language of administration, to how the Election Commission should opt for online voting.
In one such recent journey, I had the privilege of travelling with two Army dads on way to Delhi with their daughters scheduled to give a medical entrance test in the Capital. The two gentlemen with their impeccable manners chiselled out of Army life, and another businessman whose opinions were as loud as his snores that kept the coupe awake for most part of the night, made for one of those interesting rail journeys the Indian Railways is known for.
On their way from Lucknow, that too a day after some UP towns went to the polls in the first phase of elections, it was only natural that the discussion start over Mayawati and her relentless ambitions to reach Race Course Road.
It was interesting to note that almost everyone knew how much she had spent in rectifying the size of her statue and how many heads had rolled for the faux pas which saw Kanshi Ram.s mid-road figure towering over the Chief Minister.s.
A more knowledgeable man on the next seat came with the added information that there is an acute shortage of cement in Lucknow and the reason is that all stocks have been summarily sent in for the construction of these massive statues all over the State Capital.
Indeed, if you are a resident of Gomati Nagar you will be surprised by the quantum of work going on at all crossroads. Huge cemented roundabouts with larger than life statues encased in polythene bags (they are yet to be inaugurated) overwhelm you at every turn. The amount of funds being spent on this obsessive beautification by the CM leads everyone to wonder why she does not spend the same on development projects for her subjects . a move that would go a long way in catapulting her to Delhi rather than .needless statue- fication. as another passenger put it rather colloquially.
The flip side of this construction, which has made a part of Lucknow a punctuation in multi- coloured fountains and tiled structures, is that the roads have been widened and some slick ligthning introduced in large corridors. Roads resemble a runway with neon blue lights being interspersed with yellow night guiders. Lucknow has not seen such hi-tech growth earlier and Mayawati can be complimented for that.
As for the statues, in the absence of any restraining order, you could reconcile with them as an eccentricity of your leader.
The topic then shifted to the larger issue . of the General Election itself. The aspiring medical students had definitive views on the ways of conducting an election. They wondered why India should not take to online voting. .All you need to do is prepare electoral rolls based on registered email i-ds and each i-d having the power of casting one vote,. said one of the girls.
The idea sounds enchanting and totally in sync with the nation. stechnology mission though one is sure that the Election Commission would have different views about it.
As one of the Armymen told us, the mode for voting for people in the Army is really archaic. They do so through postal ballot. .I have never been able to vote in my entire career. And in more than one instance, my postal ballot has reached me much after the election is over,. he said as we all laughed in incredulity.
In such a scenario, online voting seems like manna for democracy. As for the rural areas, a similar mechanism can be developed and probably routed through e-choupals.
Come to think of it, online voting could have saved the Rs 10,000 crore that this election has cost. More importantly for the common man, IPL2 would not have had to shift to South Africa and Home Minister P Chidambaram would have been free enough to actually attend some of the T/20 thrillers in a stadium near him.
After all, online voting would have taken the huge burden of security deployment off the Government.s shoulder and everyone from the voter to the candidate would have been happy.
But all such hitech moves can happen only when Indian officialese sheds its inherent hesitance to adopt newer ways of life . one of them being switching to dual administrative language, an idea with strong votaries in the passenger list. One person felt strongly that English should be the official language of India instead of Hindi; another got up I to do with English. Yet another was ruthless in his criticism of what he called harshly .the purveyors of a foreign language.. Another matter though that he was told he had no business to be vehement about the Brits when he was travelling on a mode introduced by the goras . Indian Railways itself!
As the heat of the moment got dissolved in laughter, and the unease of an approaching altercation subsided, topics flew fast and furious . one of them being about the criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of criminals, especially in the wake of Mayawati talking of jailbird Mukhtar Ansari as Robin Hood.
Which brought the discussion to Varanasi from where Ansari is fighting the election against BJP.s Murali Manohar Joshi.
The tidings from Varanasi, which went to polls in the first phase of elections, a passenger who had been on official duty on poll day informed us, don.t seem to be going on the dotted line. He said, in this Hindu bastion of Uttar Pradesh, Joshi would be lucky to win . not because the BJP has become unpopular here or because Joshi is new to the area, but because of the cavalier attitude of the urban Hindu voter which forms the core strength of the saffron party.
As this official put it,.while the average Muslim voter, especially in the rural areas, was seen elongating the already long queues at polling booths, the urbanite Hindus used up the holiday to go malling instead of voting..
Not that the syndrome is new to the BJP. It has long been getting downed by its votebank most of whom does not go to exercise its franchise or has to be really roused from its voting slumber to actually go cast its vote. Either they are too elitist to vote, or too lazy or too cynical and that takes a long chunk of the support away from any partybanking on them.
But the issue here is not just Varansi and the tidings Joshi may not like to face. It is about the general ennui of the urban voter in chosing their candidate. A chunk of the drawing room twitterati who would rather play golf than go to vote, has a litany of complaints against the system. The list goes something like this: There is no party that meets mystandards; there are no above board candidates; there is nothing that my vote will do to change the system; what will it get me etc. His reasons are not misplaced. But by not going to vote, he or she ensures that at least one candidate gets the benefit of their absence from the ballot box. It is from here that the debate over multiple option voting emanates . and makes sense. It seems to stand to logic that the negative vote ption and the .none of the above. category beincluded into the votingsystem. At least then, the hesitent populace would not have a leg to stand on while explaining their absence from the poll day queue.
In one such recent journey, I had the privilege of travelling with two Army dads on way to Delhi with their daughters scheduled to give a medical entrance test in the Capital. The two gentlemen with their impeccable manners chiselled out of Army life, and another businessman whose opinions were as loud as his snores that kept the coupe awake for most part of the night, made for one of those interesting rail journeys the Indian Railways is known for.
On their way from Lucknow, that too a day after some UP towns went to the polls in the first phase of elections, it was only natural that the discussion start over Mayawati and her relentless ambitions to reach Race Course Road.
It was interesting to note that almost everyone knew how much she had spent in rectifying the size of her statue and how many heads had rolled for the faux pas which saw Kanshi Ram.s mid-road figure towering over the Chief Minister.s.
A more knowledgeable man on the next seat came with the added information that there is an acute shortage of cement in Lucknow and the reason is that all stocks have been summarily sent in for the construction of these massive statues all over the State Capital.
Indeed, if you are a resident of Gomati Nagar you will be surprised by the quantum of work going on at all crossroads. Huge cemented roundabouts with larger than life statues encased in polythene bags (they are yet to be inaugurated) overwhelm you at every turn. The amount of funds being spent on this obsessive beautification by the CM leads everyone to wonder why she does not spend the same on development projects for her subjects . a move that would go a long way in catapulting her to Delhi rather than .needless statue- fication. as another passenger put it rather colloquially.
The flip side of this construction, which has made a part of Lucknow a punctuation in multi- coloured fountains and tiled structures, is that the roads have been widened and some slick ligthning introduced in large corridors. Roads resemble a runway with neon blue lights being interspersed with yellow night guiders. Lucknow has not seen such hi-tech growth earlier and Mayawati can be complimented for that.
As for the statues, in the absence of any restraining order, you could reconcile with them as an eccentricity of your leader.
The topic then shifted to the larger issue . of the General Election itself. The aspiring medical students had definitive views on the ways of conducting an election. They wondered why India should not take to online voting. .All you need to do is prepare electoral rolls based on registered email i-ds and each i-d having the power of casting one vote,. said one of the girls.
The idea sounds enchanting and totally in sync with the nation. stechnology mission though one is sure that the Election Commission would have different views about it.
As one of the Armymen told us, the mode for voting for people in the Army is really archaic. They do so through postal ballot. .I have never been able to vote in my entire career. And in more than one instance, my postal ballot has reached me much after the election is over,. he said as we all laughed in incredulity.
In such a scenario, online voting seems like manna for democracy. As for the rural areas, a similar mechanism can be developed and probably routed through e-choupals.
Come to think of it, online voting could have saved the Rs 10,000 crore that this election has cost. More importantly for the common man, IPL2 would not have had to shift to South Africa and Home Minister P Chidambaram would have been free enough to actually attend some of the T/20 thrillers in a stadium near him.
After all, online voting would have taken the huge burden of security deployment off the Government.s shoulder and everyone from the voter to the candidate would have been happy.
But all such hitech moves can happen only when Indian officialese sheds its inherent hesitance to adopt newer ways of life . one of them being switching to dual administrative language, an idea with strong votaries in the passenger list. One person felt strongly that English should be the official language of India instead of Hindi; another got up I to do with English. Yet another was ruthless in his criticism of what he called harshly .the purveyors of a foreign language.. Another matter though that he was told he had no business to be vehement about the Brits when he was travelling on a mode introduced by the goras . Indian Railways itself!
As the heat of the moment got dissolved in laughter, and the unease of an approaching altercation subsided, topics flew fast and furious . one of them being about the criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of criminals, especially in the wake of Mayawati talking of jailbird Mukhtar Ansari as Robin Hood.
Which brought the discussion to Varanasi from where Ansari is fighting the election against BJP.s Murali Manohar Joshi.
The tidings from Varanasi, which went to polls in the first phase of elections, a passenger who had been on official duty on poll day informed us, don.t seem to be going on the dotted line. He said, in this Hindu bastion of Uttar Pradesh, Joshi would be lucky to win . not because the BJP has become unpopular here or because Joshi is new to the area, but because of the cavalier attitude of the urban Hindu voter which forms the core strength of the saffron party.
As this official put it,.while the average Muslim voter, especially in the rural areas, was seen elongating the already long queues at polling booths, the urbanite Hindus used up the holiday to go malling instead of voting..
Not that the syndrome is new to the BJP. It has long been getting downed by its votebank most of whom does not go to exercise its franchise or has to be really roused from its voting slumber to actually go cast its vote. Either they are too elitist to vote, or too lazy or too cynical and that takes a long chunk of the support away from any partybanking on them.
But the issue here is not just Varansi and the tidings Joshi may not like to face. It is about the general ennui of the urban voter in chosing their candidate. A chunk of the drawing room twitterati who would rather play golf than go to vote, has a litany of complaints against the system. The list goes something like this: There is no party that meets mystandards; there are no above board candidates; there is nothing that my vote will do to change the system; what will it get me etc. His reasons are not misplaced. But by not going to vote, he or she ensures that at least one candidate gets the benefit of their absence from the ballot box. It is from here that the debate over multiple option voting emanates . and makes sense. It seems to stand to logic that the negative vote ption and the .none of the above. category beincluded into the votingsystem. At least then, the hesitent populace would not have a leg to stand on while explaining their absence from the poll day queue.
Published April 19,2009, Sunday Pioneer; http://www.dailypioneer.com/170459/Commoners’-whys.html
Comments
Post a Comment