Bawa Answers...

At the Utsav in Poona, after a very spirited discussion on voting and such like, one of the guys got up and asked a very fundamental question… Why vote?!

Fortunately i had thought about it, and so gave him my answer, which i had never written out and so not posted … Here it is 

If you check out the polls, you will see that in most constituencies, a max of 60% people go and vote (shocking!). Now this 60% of the votes is typically shared between 4-6 candidates who may be contesting the election for that place. Even assuming that only 3 are the popular ones, the vote distribution will be approximately 10-15% each (of the 60) among the popular ones and the rest among the others. So we will usually have a victory with just 15-20% of the votes of a given constituency! So a person will come into power with a “majority” vote of just 15-20%, usually much less, maybe even 10-12%!!! This in itself is pretty flawed according to me, you will have a very hard time convincing me that 49% is a majority, let alone 12-20%.

Our politicians seem to be pretty good at maths, and they have done this calculation, and so know that to win an election, they need to worry ONLY about getting 20% of the votes. So they divided the country into OBC, and SC/ST and minority castes and so on, so that they could see a clear 20% of the population they would need to take care of (appease) so that they would be able to secure their vote and stay/get into power.

When you see it this way, almost every single government policy will make perfect sense 

Now how can you confound this happy little scheme? Well, if more than 90% of the population goes and votes, then just securing that cozy 20% of the votes is not going to get them into power. Then, they will have to actually take care of everyone… the majority as well as the minority, which they should have been doing in the first place, but don’t, coz the majority DOESN’T VOTE!

So to force the hand of the government to be “by the people, for the people and of the people” more PEOPLE need to vote.

The word politics actually says it all: Poli meaning many, tics meaning bloodsucking creatures. Your right of franchise, your duty to vote is the tic powder. Use it!

Jai Gurudeva!

love

bawa

ps So why should you vote? Fundamentally, because you can. You are blessed to live in a country where you CAN vote. God forbid that you suddenly wake up in a country where you can’t vote…

pps Bodhayan told me today, that the last day for filing to get voter id has been moved to april 8th… so you can still apply to vote today and tomorrow

ppss Milan sent this rather useful link for selecting who you would like to vote for:http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/