Democratic Reforms in India

British Parliamentary System and Lessons to Learn

2011-09-26T18:57:00.000+05:30

Were We Really Right To Reject Parliamentary Government?

http://lezgetreal.com/2011/09/were-we-really-right-to-reject-parliamentary-government/

Written by: L. S. Carbonell on September 22, 2011.

The Houses of Parliament

There are moments when I seriously think the British Parliamentary system is vastly superior to ours. The last 24 hours are among them.

The Speaker of the House of Commons is elected from among the membership, but denounces party affiliation upon taking the post. His, or for eight years, her parliamentary district is unrepresented while he or she holds the office. The only time a Speaker votes is to end a tie, and then his/her vote is non-partisan. Betty Boothroyd was elected speaker in 1992, the first woman ever to hold the post, and she was a pistol. Betty maintained more discipline in the Commons than either of her successors have. Not being part of either party means that the Speaker of the House of Commons never ends up in the position Speaker Boehner found himself in last night.

The Speaker of our House only calls votes when he or she is absolutely certain that the votes are there to support the bill according to his/her party’s line. Last night, 48 Republicans broke with Speaker Boehner and voted against the continuing resolution to fund the government.

The second nice thing about the British parliament would have kicked in on Boehner the first thing this morning. When the ruling party loses a vote, that can trigger a new election. The whole premise of parliamentary government is that the party that holds the majority of seats in the parliament has won the whole enchilada – the legislature and the executive. If that party can’t hold the party together, then they have lost he ability to govern. In a Parliament, Boehner’s loss last night would have set him up for the procedures to end his control of the government. Of course, in a Parliamentary system, Boehner wouldn’t be Speaker, he’d be Prime Minister.

Which leads us to the third thing I really, really like about the British system….their elections. Parliamentary elections are held on a five year cycle, unless the government fails for some reason. When scheduling the election, there is very little leeway. An election must be held withing six weeks of the call for them. A savvy Prime Minister will announce that he/she will be calling for the election at the end of a four-week recess, effectively stretching the campaign season to a whole, whopping ten weeks. No one can campaign outside of that six to ten week period. They don’t campaign from the day after the election to the day before the next one. And they don’t vote directly for the Prime Minister. He or she is chosen in the party convention to be the leader of the party. If the party wins the parliamentary election, he or she automatically becomes Prime Minister.

The elections themselves are beautiful. Each parliamentary district is ideally less than 96,000 people. There are 650 members for a population of 62,262,000. For at least the three decades that I’ve been watching them, the results are in before dawn the next day. If the Parliament chances party, the old Prime Minister presents him/herself to the Queen around 11:30 the day after the election to tender his/her resignation and at high noon the new Prime Minister arrives to be accepted by Her Majesty. The transition is made this simple because the minority party creates what is known as the “shadow government” – a one-on-one match for the actual government, a government in waiting. It is not necessary to have a two-and-a-half month period or longer for naming every secretary of every department because they have already been chosen and have been completely informed of everything that is going on in the government.

As we face the umpteenth Republican candidate debate in this two-year-long election cycle tonight, the idea of a six to ten week election cycle, a single party leader debate (the last election was the first-ever such debate), and an immediate transfer of power sounds so delightful.

Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington DC

2010-04-08T21:50:00.001+05:30

If you wish to get involved with a memorial project for Martin Luther King, please check out this link:

http://mlkmemorialnews.org

You can also donate online for the same.

Some technological issues with elections.

2009-06-06T16:11:00.002+05:30

This post was long due given that it stems from an experience about 2 months ago. Whenever I need to understand something I go to a person who seems knowledgeable in that subject and talk to him/her. In this regard I have had a chat about various technological issues asssociated to voting, with a Theoretical Computer Science prof at TIFR (my current instutute) and in general my experience has been that people in the Theoretical Computer Science do have an amazing level of clarity with thinking and precision about everything they do.
I have a great admiration for people in this field.

So this prof is very young. May be just 5 years older to me. He recently got his PhD in the subject from UIUC (USA).He is a Keralite and did his B.Tech from IITKgp.

So here are the few insights that we generated during the discussion.

It isn't very clear that the use of EVMs has really made the voting process very significantly fair. Now it is just a matter of what kind of forces the political parties need to harness to rig the elections. Earlier it used to be local goons and thugs and now it probably has to be some electronics engineers and techie people. We have often joked about the possibility of the political parties going for "campussing" in the IITs and other such engineering institutes hiring tech people.

Earlier we have heard of such things happen in West Bengal: that therewould be a hole in on the top of the election room and a person would be sitting on the roof watching through the hole as to whom the person inside voted! This guy would be employed by the party X and if the person inside the booth didn't vote for part X then he would give a signal to the thugs outside from the roof-top , so that as soon as the person comes out he/she gets bashed up the goons.

This is where EVMs have definitely made a difference. "Secret Ballot" has become a little more secret than usual. But it hasn't probably made mcuh of a difference to the rigging situation. Thre have anyway been n number of claims of the EVM circuit being tweaked by some party the night before in the godown where the EVMs are kept.

Now the issue is what about the problem of people not being able to vote because of not being present in their constituency during their voting. This rule definitely needs to be changed given that such a large section of the youth voters live in the hostels of the various colleges far away from their home-towns. It would be a huge transportation chaos if all of the students have to be come home during the election date. They can have exams and what not. So it seems that there is good enough reason to start electronic voting and sms-voting.

The obvious issue with electronic voting is that of online identity resolution. (and there are slightly more non-obvious problems which I shall come on later) But then it isn't very clear why simple solutions like a password protected site with Captcha will not solve the problem. Only glitch being that since we have anyway experience of the "great" internet abilities of the Indian government it might be a good idea to lease out the running of these web-pages and voting sites to professional web-development companies.

And with sms voting the identity resolution seems to be slightly at stake unless we can develop some very sophisticated phones. In the common cell-phoes it is easily possible for a same person to cast multiple sms votes and I am not sure how password protected voting will work on cell-phones. Sms voting reminds me of the consistent fraud which hapenned with these reality-music shows which used sms-voting. Where the parents of the contestants distributed money in their localities to motivate people to send multiple smses in favour of their kids.

Now if we can develop very sophisticated phones which have say an iris pattern recognition system built on them which will get linked to the voting website as soon as the person logs into it. So the website will allow only 1 vote per iris pattern. But phones with such technologies to get into the market will probably take 50 more years.

Now consider the slightly non-obvious problem with internet voting. Imagine a person with a laptop going into a locality with a gun in his hand and asking all the people to vote for party X on the website by logging in to the web-site infront of him. Done! End of all election systems. With internet voting the "secretness" of the ballot will probably be totally gone. But then the issue of bribing the electorate for getting votes becomes a little more lucrative for the parties since now one can "see" whom the guy voted for. Now the parties can start "paying" for the votes only when the vote has been cast *infront of them*! The guy can come with a suitcase of cash and a laptop and a gun and sit with it and ask the people to queue infront of him. And then ask them to come up one by one and cast their vote in the net infront of him so that he is sure that they have voted for his party and then he will hand over the 1000Rs to the person.

So with internet voting there is greater "incentive" for the corrupt parties to bribe the electorate while the guarantee of return on the money used in bribing was less with EVM or the paper ballot. In EVMs and paper ballot the party has to pay the voter *before* the casting of the vote and there is no way for the party to check whether the bribed guy double crossed him! Hence with internet voting things can literally be "cash for vote" (With verification!). Hence a simple internet voting jeopardizes the sitaution further by giving greater incentive to corruption.

But a slight change in the mechanism of the voting web-site one can probably gain greater fairness with all the advantages of internet voting kept intact: By using something which we called the "last vote registering". Here the voter is allowed to vote multiple number of times and only his/her last vote will be counted for. So what happens is that even if the voter is forced to vote for a certain party infront of the man with the guna and cash he/she can still go back home or later sneak into a cyber-cafe somehwre and cast his vote again. Here the corrupt party loses all incentive for bribing since what this bribed guy votes infront of him can be completely reversed later!

But there will still be a way out for the really desperate and corrupt party. The corrupt party can ensure that except for the places where it has his men with laptop guns and cash at all other places the network is snapped of. So that all homes and cyber-cafes in the area don't have internet connection on that day. But even such a desperate attempt will not be able to deter the dedicated voter since she/he can stil vote *again* by going to her/his office which is likely to be far away from her/his locality and have an interbnet connection.

To end it my primary concern being not the fairness of the election process but the lives of the election officers lost in the election process in India. I consider them to be "martyrs" at the same level of respect as soldiers who die in the battlefield defending the nation. They fought for democracy and lost their lives.

It is a matter of great shame that even in this recent election in India so many election officers lost their lives.
My interests in looking at newer technologies of voting is to eliminate this concept of "election officers".

In response to "Aazadi.."

2009-05-18T03:23:00.004+05:30

I had thought of putting this up as a comment on my colleague Pratish's post but then I thought it was too long to be be a comment and hence it became a quick post.
{Further somehow my comment didn't get registered! Some technical snag.}

5 points in response:

1. Your data about the financial aspect of the Indian elections and the GDP hike are probably taken from here.

Thanks to Vipul for pointing out this link to me.

2. The Indian Constitution is definitely a magnificently precise document and aptly called the "Lawyer's Paradise". A research paper like precision was the need to keep such a diverse and complex country together and it was the genius of Dr.Ambedkar to forsee this.

But then again its immense complexity also gives rise to a million loop holes which have time again been abused.

Further the Indian Constitution has not been able to produce an Uniform Civil Code and most sorrowfully the marriage acts of India are still religion based. This a cause for utmost shame for India.

Indian Constitution definitely needs a thorough revision and updating.

3. The fact that Indian electorate this time was 741 million is a big blotch on the image of India. It only shows how terribly we have failed to do population control and how miserably the education system has failed.

India will one day pay heavily for this stark neglect of primary education and politicization of higher education.
4. I strongly oppose your view that democracy is in the Indian psyche. Far from it.

It has been only 62 years India has been a democracy and never ever before that in its 3000 year old history has it ever been a democracy. I think 62 years is too short a time for the common man to internalize and understand the tremendously abstract and subtle idea of democracy. Comparatively US has been having elections for about the last 200 years.

Ever so often Indian masses indulge in idolatry and someone gets hailed as the "king" or the "queen" and ever so often some politician gets termed as the "kingmaker". We are still to come out of thinking in terms of "malik" (owner) and "naukar" (servant) and these terms get used in India for every form of hierarchy whereas in reality NO hierarchy should be termed so. And so often so employees in an office call their boss as "saheb" (a term which originates from the address to British officers!)

India has a long long way to go to attain true democratic status. Success of democracy goes hand in hand with the penetration of education in the society and the status of the later in India is dismal to say the least.

But yes definitely this year the Indian Electorate has shown considerable maturity and intelligence by virtually killing so many corrupt people and parties working along divisive lines of caste and religion and regional issues and opportunists.

But the fact that some such elements have still made it through says that we as a nation still have a long way to go.

5. If in the last 3000 years of Indian history there is one thing that has time and again defined India is its scientific creativity and research potential. 2000 years ago when civilizations were being born elsewhere India had produced the mathematics of calculus and theory of infinite series and predictive astronomy and plastic surgery (including even the science of doing amputations without causing infections!) and amazing level of phenomenological medical knowledge.

And not to mention the terrific rise of architectural brilliance in the 18th century. India had then been an exceptional engineering heaven.

Sorrowfully this essential identity of India gets strongly deprioritized by the Indian democracy and the election choices. There are just so few people in the parliament from the scientific fields and almost never does science education and research gets mentioned as the prime concern of the government. If India has to become the major world player in this century it has to ensure exponential growth in its scientific and academic efforts.

Indian elections are yet to mature to reflect this reality.

Aazadi..

2009-05-17T10:16:00.001+05:30

Came by this interesting story while reading the newspaper a few days ago - A small village girl was waiting by the side of the dusty road for her poor, illiterate father. "Aapke pocket mai kya hai, abba?", she asked curiously looking at his decrepit face. The father put his hand in the pocket and removed a voter ID card. "Yeh hai meri Aazadi", he smiled.

When an illiterate man can understand the power that that a voter ID card has, why can't the so-called educated class? Or are we so pompous that we should not care? Are we so above 'mediocrity' that we should be obtuse to matters relevant to development of our own motherland? More than 60 years after India gained Independence, if there is one thing that holds this diverse country together, it's this loktantra. The democracy philosophy is etched deeply in the Indian psyche, and no matter what skeptics say, there is nothing that can beat it. With a registered voter base of over 714 million Indians [something which some continents don't even have as net population], this election in India can surely be called as the biggest democratic exercise on the planet. I read somewhere that this time, about $3 billion were spent by parties and candidates on advertising, transportation, endorsements and, you guessed right, bribing. It is expected to give an almost 0.5% stimulus to India's GDP for 2 quarters this year, according to Kotak Securities. The number of polling officials employed by the Election Commission was a staggering 46 lakh. This is just mind-boggling. No wonder foreign countries are simply in awe of this mammoth event. I read in the newspaper few days ago that some countries sent their representatives and Election Commission officials to learn a lesson or two from the Indian Election Commission. Democracy is the best gift that our founding fathers bestowed upon us. We may criticize Pandit Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar, Sardar Patel and others every now-and-then, but it was due to their extreme love for the country that we lead a stable life today. It is because of their cautiousness and thoughtfulness that an event as large, complex and sensitive as this can pass smoothly with minimal hiccups. They rightly have been called visionaries, great men who put the country before their individual egos. Maybe, 150 years of British rule taught us the right lessons at the right time to stay united. India truly was blessed with able leaders at that time. Else, with a diversity much more complex than our own neighbor, we would not have even survived like a fragile nation that Pakistan is now. Sometime back, me and my brother [who too, is interested in politics and matters alike] were comparing some data about the Indian Constitution that he had. We compared our Constitution with the that of countries like France, USA and Argentina. That was one occasion when I really felt proud about my country. But I felt a little ashamed too. I realized how much efforts our past leaders had made in making a near flawless rule-book in the hope that this great nation will never have to face internal or external threats and how conveniently indifferent we have been all along. Even a non-expert like me could easily distinguish and appreciate the level of sophistication invested in the making of our Constitution. It made me realize the base on which our country is founded is so firm and strong.

But why then do we face so much ambiguity when it comes to forming a Government now at the Centre? Why, for the past 20 years has there not been even one single party Government? Why do the major parties have to dance to the whims and fancies of minor, regional parties every single time? This is the real, valid internal threat to India's democracy. And it seems the voter community shrewdly realized this and punished the regional netas [like Sharad Pawar, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Smt. Mayawati] to some extent this time. More than 300 parties contested this national election, 7 of whom were deemed national parties [both numbers are just hilarious]. In the event of a fractured mandate, the following things are likely to happen -
1] Immense behind-the-stage bribing and horse-trading [which is evident in some ways already].
2] No matter how accommodating everybody is, it will remain a fragile formation with a constant threat of Government collapse. One partner gone and it could be Game Over.
3] Instead of being a National Government taking decisions of national consensus, every time some regional player will try to extract his 'pound of flesh' by hijacking national policy meetings with petty regional issues. This inevitably will drag down development and correctly indicate that the Government is like a directionless boat.

It took 150 years for this country to realize the virtues of staying united. Do we want to tread down that same nasty road? Do we want history to repeat itself? It's high time we valued the Aazadi that we have been bestowed upon before our country breaks down again into tiny fiefdoms. As I said before, based on this election's mandate, the people of India seem to have been alerted to this possibility, but not in entirety. It is the voter's responsibility to finish off this threat forever.

PS : On a personal note, I did NOT vote this time. I was staying in a random place [in the constituency of Chennai] of which I really know nothing. Had I been in Pune, I definitely would have voted, for I know what matters and what's going on. So, it was rather disappointing when I found out that only 40% of the people in Pune voted. Next time, if I'm in a well-acquainted place, I will note lose my chance; because, as they say, "no vote, no opinion."

Note : This article has also been posted on my other personal blog : this

NoCriminals

2009-04-18T16:34:00.002+05:30

Useful data compiled by National Election Watch for the 2004 general elections

Criminal Cases by State

State	Total seats	Criminal Cases	% of state
Daman and Diu	1	1	100%
Jharkhand	14	7	50%
Goa Maharashtra Punjab Bihar Kerala Uttar Pradesh NCT of Delhi	2	1	50%
	48	19	40%
	13	5	38%
	37	13	35%
	20	6	30%
	80	23	29%
	7	2	29%
Gujarat	26	7	27%
Chhattisgarh	11	3	27%
Madhya Pradesh	29	7	24%
Tamil Nadu	39	8	21%
Karnataka	28	6	21%
Haryana	10	2	20%
Orissa	21	3	14%
West Bengal	42	5	12%
Rajasthan	25	3	12%
Andhra Pradesh	42	4	10%
Andaman and Nicobar	1
Arunachal Pradesh	2
Assam	14
Chandigarh	1
Dadra & Nagar Haveli	1
Himachal Pradesh	4
Jammu and Kashmir	6
Lakshadweep	1
Manipur	1
Meghalaya	2
Mizoram	1
Nagaland	1
Puducchery	1
Sikkim	1
Tripura	2
Uttarakhand	5
Total	539	125	23%

Criminals Cases by Party

Party	Total	Criminal	% of
Party	MPs	cases	party
JMM	5	5	100%
SHS	12	7	58%
NCP	9	5	56%
SAD	8	4	50%
BSP	19	8	42%
JD(U)	8	3	38%
RJD	21	8	38%
AIFB	3	1	33%
JD(S)	3	1	33%
SP	36	11	31%
CPI	10	3	30%
DMK	16	4	25%
LJNSP	4	1	25%
MDMK	4	1	25%
BJP	138	29	21%
INC	145	26	18%
CPM	43	7	16%
BJD	11	1	9%
AGP	2
AIMIM	1
AITC	2
BNP	1
IFDP	1
IND	4
JKN	2
JKPDP	1
KEC	1
MNF	1
MUL	1
NLP	1
NPF	1
PMK	6
RLD	3
RPI(A)	1
RSP	3
SDF	1
SJP®	1
TDP	5
TRS	5
Total	539	125	23%

Data obtained from NoCriminals.org
Please don't vote the candidate who has criminal background.

Some thoughts about the upcoming elections in India.

2009-03-16T22:45:00.005+05:30

Recently got my legs pulled and jibed at by a senior of mine, Vipul (from my alma-mater CMI and currently at UChicago doing a PhD in Mathematics,) about the stagnant situation of this blog and whether democracy can really be reformed by people who blog about it only once in 2 months.

{ Actually one can look at in this way: I have not been able to put up updates on this blog since I was too busy with my Physics whose professional requirements have been mounting off-late. Hence I was spending more time with Physics. Now is this a bad logic that I have actually been contributing more to the nation by trying to do my Physics well rather than blogging here? }

Anyway thanks to Vipul's comments and pokes, it accelerated the process of me finally writing down some things which I have been thinking of recently. The election round the corner seems to provocate enough number of dinner and coffee table discussions to keep one's mind thinking and hence thought of sharing some of the thoughts which I discussed during these discussions.

1. One thing has always worried me as to whether election makes any sense in a country where most voters are illiterate and are probably have little or no information about the political scenario and the plans of the parties and the larger questions that the country needs to face. Can't really blame the people because if one has to struggle day in and day out to make one's both ends meet one simply can't afford to keep track of the larger questions! The larger issues are simply a luxury when you are not assured of your next meal.

In this situation what is the difference between large number of uneducated/(mis/non) informed or non-thinking voters voting and voting by a random number generator? Like we can have a button on the EVM which will call a rand() function when pressed!

It seems to me that a random number generator will be better since it will be unbiased and might help a better party win in comparison to a corrupt politician being able to "buy" these non-thinking voters by dubious means.

Here one also sees why issues like "caste" and "religion" and "telengana" issue based voting makes such an impact in India. When the population is so huge with no net coherence of thought then if some local issue can cause a local correlation it has large contribution to the net scenario since the rest of the system is anyway randomized! Thats what politicians use, cause local polarization (especially with a non-thinking mass) based in local issues hoping that there is no large scale coherence.

This actually shows why "blogs" are potentially powerful. They can become centers to cause these correlations among a certain section of the population and that can become non-trivial.

2. The point about becoming an effective voter is whether as a voter I am a "thinker" who takes a well-thought decision or a "believer" who goes by the hype and votes for the party which best hypnotizes me into believing in them.

As Vipul put it in a catchy question to me

"Do you think you are believer or you believe that you are a thinker?"

Let us first realize that the essential reflection of whether one is a thinker or a believer is in the way the person makes "choices". Its the process of decision making that amounts to making a choice is what differentiates between "thinkers" and the rest. It can start from simple things like working on a maths question where at every step one needs to think to decide the optimal next step and also in bigger questions like choosing one's life-partner.

Let me try to list out here as to what all a person needs to be a "thinker" apart from the basic minimum intelligence which unfortunately a person cannot change :

1. Freedom of choice.

Unless one has choices there is no use of the ability to think. If one gets excessively constrained that one's choices then there is nothing that the person can do even if he/she can think. Now choices can get constrained by internal as well as external reasons. Internal as in, I fail to see the choices that exist or may be for external reasons where some external force closes choices for me. like as a dalit landless farmer facing the guns of the rich upper-caste landlords, my choices in life are too constrained.

A large section of the Indian electorate is deprived of this fundamental thing as in freedom to choice.

And pretty paradoxically this section of the people who are artificially deprived of choices are the one's for whom a good government might make the biggest difference. Rich businessmen and people in research are probably more immune to political perturbations.

2. Relevant and correct information.

This is the next step. I have enough intelligence to think and say I have choices but still I need some substance to start thinking on. An Economics Nobel Laureate simply can't think about a question in Quantum Theory unless she/he knows enough Physics.

Thats the basic kind of problem a large section of the Indian electorate faces. Many simply can't afford to get time to get themselves informed about the parties and the larger issues since they have their first priority to arrange for food! Who cares about what happens to the nation when I am hungry and have no food to eat? And another considerable section of the population simply doesn't care to find out though they have lots of resources since either they are too busy with their profession or busy hanging out at the malls. Somehow given the kinds of lives we live cocooned inside research institutes worrying day and night about courses, assignments, exams and science, politics and larger questions of India seems pretty distant.

Given that large sections of the population don't cast a well-thought vote..I don't know what sense democracy makes in a country like this.

Now there are 3 sides to see in this:

1. If everybody is busy with his/her life striving for professional excellence isn't that by economic ideas an optimal state for the country? How does it then matter whether each person is thinking about the future of governance and larger national questions since anyway every person is trying for professional excellence?

May be the above idea can be put in analogy with the idea of economics that "we get our bread because the baker wants to make profit". The idea is that such a set of people is creating "positive externalities" for each other and the system is thus progressive and then why would anyone need a government? Somehow isn't it possible for such a system of "self-optimizing systems" to show some kind of spontaneous large scale collaboration like what in statistical physics is called "self-organized criticality"?

The associated idea is that a single man's vote is irrelevant to the election since one vote cannot make difference to the future and the energy and time needed to spend to inform oneself and vote knowledgeably is huge.

And at the end of all this research the person for whom this party voted might not win. Hence the "net payoff" in this process tends to 0 and hence this makes no economic sense for a person to drop commitment to one's profession and educate oneself about the larger national issues.

So why should anyone vote?

2. When every person is trying to achieve personal professional excellence then everyone is tending to get into a tunnel vision where one is slowly missing the larger picture and anyway people are only going to create positive externalities only locally and not cause large scale collaborations to happen.

This is where the government chips in with an external view of the larger picture to cause macroscopic reallocation of resources to optimize its utilization by the entire population as opposed to the only local optimization that you and I can cause.

Hence one needs a good government.

3. Education and ability to think brings in with it a sense of individualism and independence of thought. How likely is it that a set of such people will show cohesion and coherent thinking? Why hasn't it happened that all the good students across the various world class institutes in India like CMI, ISI, IIT, TIFR get together to form a party which will surely have an average IQ and education billion times any other existing party?

Why should a thinker voter when the rest of the thinkers can't think cohesively to put up candidate?

Is election necessarily a compromise?

The question is where does the market equilibrate between these 3 competing factors? Can a government have this global ability to cause large scale optimization by macroscopic rearrangement of resources? Can a government be expected to have enough insight and information to cause this?

If the answers to the above question is "no" and if anyway most voters are "non-thinkers" (and hence 1 thinker's vote counts for nought) and even economically it makes no sense to try to be a "thinker" w.r.t voting, why should I vote or worry about casting a good vote instead of doing Physics and Maths properly?

Jaago Re!

2009-01-16T11:17:00.002+05:30

I have just returned from a discovery of India train trip called Jagriti Yatra. Meeting people of high passion and integrity whereever we went. One such young man we met in Bangalore is Jasmine Shah--the brain behind famous TATA Tea Jaago Re Campaign. Jasmine is just 27, is an IIT pass-out and is working with full dedication for a key cause (asking people, especially the young Indians to vote) that he believes will tranform the democratic scenario in India. Like many of us young people, Jasmine too felt very disturbed by the state of our politics. Blaming politicians and the system has become a favorite pass-time among our people. The young Indians, especially the urban youth, have grown up to be apathetic towards our political system. Jasmine believed that if we have any right to blame the system, we must first perform our duty of casting a vote. He also wondered why in a country which has nearly 60% of its population below the age of 30 we do not have a more younger representation in our political leadership? It was one article in India Today that triggered Jasmine to launch his Jaago Re Campaign. The article talked about how the outcome of a local election in Bihar was turned around to a positive one by the sheer power of youth vote. Jasmine wanted this to happen at national level--simply by encouraging young voters to go out and vote. His Jaago Re campaign was thus born and no wonder the TATA's were there to support such a noble cause.

Jasmine hopes to have a minimum of 1 million voter registrations done by the upcoming assembly polls. An urban Indian can now register himself for voting on Jaagore.com The website breaks several myths regarding our electoral process. Kudos to Jasmine and his team! Jaago Re Indian Youth!

It’s time for a party

2009-01-13T16:06:00.000+05:30

It’s time for a party

We are in the beginning of a New Year. The air is charged with election fever. The time is right to think about a new approach to politics and a new agenda for political parties.

All the parties in the field today have become prisoners of their past. Caste, region- or community-based thinking or highfalutin claims of secularism, as a veneer to hide vote bank politics, has become the norm. Thanks to extensive corruption we have had an ever deteriorating record of very bad governance. No wonder, the recent Mumbai terrorist attack resulted in an explosion of anger against the political class. One of the advisors of President Elect Obama has noted that a crisis is an opportunity that should not be wasted. Is our crisis in governance, culminating in 26/11, and an opportunity for creating a space for a new political party or a new basis for political dialogue?

It is never too late to learn. As Rajaji observed the low value charcoal in our kitchen, the costlier graphite in our pencils and the diamond in our rings have the same chemical element carbon. If a lifeless substance like carbon can change so dramatically in value depending on the temperature and pressure conditions under which it was formed, how much greater must be the potential for change for the better in sentient live humans?

There may be still hope for our parties if they think of adopting a new agenda for politics. Totally new parties or NGOs in the process of emerging as regular political parties, as parties like Dr Jayaprakash Narain’s Loksatta, can easily adopt a new agenda in tune with India’s real needs today and take advantage of the national sentiment following the shock of 26/11.

The basic mantra must be to put and end to divisive politics, get out of the ever shrinking identity traps and strongly promote the idea that we are all Indians, one people, sharing a common motherland and a great tradition of culture and civilization.

The simple unifying principle for such an effort would be an imaginative adoption of universal employment as the tara ka mantra. Our vaunted demographic dividend will turn into a nightmare if we don’t provide productive employment to youth. Ensuring productive employment to them should be the goal of the party.

From this will follow a whole set of strategies and policies for a ready nationwide appeal. The first element of this strategy should be productivity and war on waste in all sectors. The second element should be a national effort at skill development. This will call for a drastic change in the access to education, producing world-class educational institutions and not denying access to any Indian to the best education on grounds of caste, community and other shibboleths of social justice. The third element would be autonomy of the institutions of education along with effective regulation to ensure that, while malpractices are not tolerated, new initiatives are encouraged. The fourth element of strategy would be encouraging entrepreneurship with a flexible labor policy. The fifth element would be elimination of corruption from all sectors by simplifying regulations and eliminating red tape.

The sixth element should be a system of built-in-accountability in the implementation of every law and policy. Our greatest failure as a nation is our poor record of implementation, thanks to a built-in culture of lack of accountability. 26/11 was the latest proof of this sad reality.

A nation cannot have poor public health and hope to emerge as an economic power. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) as the root for access to public health must be the seventh element of this strategy. A new party based on these seven elements can bring a refreshing reorientation in the sterile self-destructive political debate of today. After all as the old Gujarati proverb says, “Jaagya, thyar thi savaar” (The day begins when you wake up).

I VOTE NOBODY Law-Its Time to Use This

2009-01-07T14:05:00.001+05:30

Section 49-O of the Constitution -
Did you know that there is a system in our constitution, as per the 1969 act, in section "49-O" that a person can go to the polling booth, confirm his identity, get his finger marked and convey the presiding election officer that he doesn't want to vote anyone!
Yes such a feature is available, but obviously these seemingly notorious leaders have never disclosed it. This is called "49-O".
Why should you go and say "I VOTE NOBODY"... because, in a ward, if a candidate wins, say by 123 votes, and that particular ward has received "49-O" votes more than 123, then that · polling will be cancelled and · Will have to be re-polled. · Not only that, but the candidature of the contestants will be removed and they cannot contest the re-polling, since people had already expressed their decision on them. This would bring fear into parties and hence look for genuine candidates for their parties for election. This would change the way, of our whole political system... it is seemingly surprising why the election commission has not revealed such a feature to the public....
Please spread this news to as many as you know... Seems to be a wonderful weapon against corrupt parties in India ... show your power, expressing your desire not to vote for anybody, is even more powerful than voting... so don't miss your chance. So either vote, or vote not to vote (vote 49-O) and pass this info on...
"Please forward this mail to as many as possible, so that we, the people of India , can really use this power to save our nation".
Use your vote right for a better INDIA .

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 3) {Characater of terror and what money can and cannot buy.}

2009-01-06T01:22:00.002+05:30

A naive question that sometimes rises in my mind is if let us say India were a nation where everyone is well-fed and every person has a happy life and everyone is well-educated then will India become completely resistant to all sorts of terror activities? Will such an India be a land which doesn't even become the breeding ground for terrorism? If everyone in this world has sufficient resources to survive then will that world be devoid of terrorism?

I deeply feel that the face of terror has changed a lot and the modern form of terrorism CAN NOT be checked by access to good life to everyone. Osama comes from a very rich family and his top men are well-educated professionals who are doctors, engineers etc.

We should realize that terrorists are no Robin Hoods who are fighting to acquire resources for some deprived people. They are basically thinkers who are motivated by some idealism beyond measure and are not coming from any economically deprived background.

Of course one is aware of how many poor families are exploited by these terror groups. They get threatened to pay either a large sum of money to these outfits or send some of their young men in the family to join the group. Obviously the poor people choose the later alternative. The poor section of the people are very vulnerable to exploitation and they eventually act as feeding centers of these groups.

But even then the question rises if there were no such poor people to exploit will terror groups get crippled?

Again I feel that the answer is NO. There are thousands of intellectuals across the world who are brain-running these organizations. They are well educated people with specific ideological motives. They are sharper diplomats than most governments have and are fine thinkers. They have propaganda running all around to motivate the young and educated to join their outfits and become vehicles in their way to attain those political and ideological goals. There is a huge section of these terror groups who are joining these outfits not out of any need or force but by sheer motivation of ideology.

A world where resources are available to everyone is not going to prevent the rise of this educated and motivated section of the terror groups.

One must realize that not every lay man can be converted into a terrorist. It is not easy to motivate a person to go on a kill and have him kill thousands. It takes a lot of awareness and understanding (or probably mis-understanding!) of the history and political complications that exist in this world to feel motivated for a reason and motivated enough to lay down one's life and kill thousands for it. It is a very different level of inspiration than what we can off-hand imagine. Many feel inspired by the words of some great orators like say Vivekananda or by the words of some public figure or politicians but these inspirations are far less than what is required to lay down one's life for it or kill thousands for it.

There is probably no one in India who is motivated by any politician or spiritual leader in India to the extent to which the terrorists are motivated by their intellectual gurus running these organizations from far away.

War against terrorism is not a fight against a few hundred men with sophisticated rifles but a fight against some ideologies which are far more stronger than anything else when it comes to motivate people.

To summarize we should realize the following character of the terrorists:

1. They are NOT a bunch of irrational people creating havoc. They are decisive thinkers with immense education behind them, who have a very specific interpretation of history and politics of this world. They are cool thinkers working with definite purpose and methods. They are people working with definite organization and discipline.

One can put it this way that if someday India concedes Kashmir to Pakistan then Masoor Azad and such men will be hailed as "freedom fighters" by many people and whose lives will be taught in history books in some parts of the world just as we teach about the lives of Bhagat Singh to Indian school children. Reciprocally British considered Bhagat Singh to be a terrorist and life of Bhagat Singh is not taught to British school children.

In our war against terrorism we should keep in mind that against whom we are fighting are glorified as "freedom fighters" among large sections of the people.

2. They are NOT people "without return address" (as US believed them to be some-time ago). They have specific shelters and refuge centers across the world. They have powerful patrons. Whenever they see themselves getting cornered by some government they have specific places to return to and hibernate, regroup and then again attack back when the time is ripe.

3. They are NOT people who are working out of deprivation. They are well-off people fighting for their ideological goals. One cannot hope to bargain with terrorists by offering in exchange money or other resources.

Terrorists have enough of anything that money can buy.

So any plan to counter terrorists have to keep the following in mind:

1. The immediate aim of the war has to be to try to eliminate the intellectual sources of terrorism with as much urgency as governments try to eliminate the financial and other material sources of terrorism.

With the thinkers and philosophers gone what shall be left of the terrorists is just clusters of men trained to shoot. Indian army can take care of them with ease. What the army will not be able to fight with ease are the thousands of strategists and political thinkers across the world who are motivating people across the world to fight for their ideals.

2. Talk to the vulnerable youth before the terrorist propaganda talks to them!
This I think is the most important thing to do now as an extension of the education system of India.

This shall have to be an extensive outreach form of the education system which goes knocking door to door across India and neighbouring countries to teach the youth about the ideas of nationhood and ways to practical realization of it. To teach them use their skills to directly solve the problems that their nation faces and do these BEFORE the sophisticated thinkers behind terror outfits go picking these youngsters and brainwashing them into their ideas of killing.

3. Try to eliminate poverty in specific places where terror groups are active. They are most vulnerable. If poverty elimination looks like a long plan then at least immediately hike up the security of these economically backward regions.

4. Have an extreme level of control of who and what enters through the borders of India. A definitive form of identification of every resident of India, like say a number that shall identify every Indian. And every person in India should be able to prove his identity of being an Indian by that number whenever and wherever demanded of. You might be sitting in the cafe with your girlfriend but if demanded suddenly in the cafe by some passing by army person, you should be able to prove that you are an Indian by that unique number. And if the person fails to do so she/he should be immediately taken into custody.

This may sound harsh but given the situation in India this is time for strict measures.

It shall be a very difficult thing to implement in a country of 1 billion where so many people are homeless and where there are million remote areas where no transport goes. But still I think this is an effort worth trying.\

Apart from the security aspect this numerical identification has the chance of unifying India through a common means rising beyond all other local identities.

We have too large and rough a boundary with Himalayas on one side and ocean on the other. Our borders are too porous and it is too difficult to control what goes on there. But we have to have very strict control of what goes in and goes out of it. Such high security at the borders will mean a sharp decline in the trade that occurs there but I suppose when national security is at stake it is a very small cost to pay.

The above control at the boundary and control over identification will definitely need to be supported by a strong drive across the nation to curb the population growth drastically. Today it is time we look at no child per family rule. 1 child per family also looks to be too costly given the devastatingly large burden of 1 billion.

Today standing in these times let us all Indians exchange all our personal freedoms and choices if the need comes for the sake of national security and to fight terrorism. It is not the time to be politically correct. It is not the time to preach ideas of a liberal world and democracy.

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 2) {Is the "Indian" fighting terrorism?}

2009-01-06T01:16:00.002+05:30

It is simple mathematics that the sum of a randomly chosen set of vectors will tend to 0 as we keep increasing the number of vectors. Precisely the situation with India. The huge diversity that exists in India rarely ever seems to work in favour of the nation since this diversity has through out history prevented any coherence between the thoughts of people across India to develop. The random phase differences has always led to destructive interference and whenever our Indian identity is suddenly under attack, like by Kasab and his men, the entire set of 1 billion people are unable to immediately respond with any unanimous voice or action. Aptly reflected in the dilapidated and confused response of the government to the issue.

How many more attacks on this land will it take for this nation to feel united?

India as it stands today is a land where one can get anything from life to love with money or muscle power. It is a nation where everything is a commodity and anything can be sold and acquired by force be it life or sex or body organs or seats in the parliament or seats in the train or marks in the examination. It is a nation where even the best of students in the elite institutes of India can be seen dancing to the tunes of the professors and buttering them to keep them happy so that they can get good grades and good recommendation letters so that they can get a seat in some US university. (Leave alone the fact that many professors are vulnerable to such lowly behaviours!). When I was in school in St.Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata, in class 8 I had seen my Hindi teacher "selling" marks in the examination. I didn't feel even slightly disappointed at failing in that exam when after the exam I saw one student go to the teacher after the class and telling him "Sir, Is 100Rs for every mark okay with you?". Over the next few days that teacher got gifts of various kinds. Since today I have no way to prove this incident in court, I can't write here the name of the teacher.

This nation CAN NOT fight terrorism.

We as a nation have been completely unable to build in some basic civic sense and environment consciousness. We have been unable to prevent people from spitting and throwing garbage in the streets and have been unable to ensure that people don't get into the trains without a reservation ticket. Leave alone the fact that most train ticket checkers in India can be bribed to get a place to sit in the train even if it is by the toilet! India as a nation has failed to imbibe within its people the basic ideas of honesty and correctness. It is a nation that lacks sincerity with anything it does and we unashamedly keep taking pride in some great men who have been from India whereas the rest of the country is completely disjoint from these handful of great Indians. It is a nation that has never seen a renaissance or a revolution that affected the common man. The common man has historically been kept away from all sorts of intellectual reforms or political upheavals.

And obviously in this strain one should mention our shameful failure to check the population growth. Its a time-bomb that has blasted and the repercussions continue to thrash us in day to day life. Various reasons rising from mainly vote-bank politics has corrupted the politicians and have prevented them from talking about this issue bravely and facing the population expansion problem. It seems completely ridiculous that this country in 50 years post independence can't control its population!

This failure is a collective failure of the Indian education system resulting from politically driven education system where every thing is done with the aim of ensuring a win in the elections than what is good for the country. We have compromised to the extent of not teaching some basic ideas to the students in fear that this might conflict other social and religious teachings and might result in the mass angered against the government.

This inability of India to follow logic and look beyond social customs and religious teachings has resulted in a jeopardized large population. A large population immediately becomes a breeding ground for hideous activities (could be terrorism ) since it is so easy to hide oneself in this large population.

India faces a complete internal security failure in form of loss of accountability of the people.

This nation CAN NOT fight terrorism.

What India lacks in general today is a sense of honesty at every level apart from the most tangible loss in the form of being prone to bribes and corruptions. Most professors in even the elite institutes of India simply come and go having taught nothing useful in the classes or having made any effort to be correct or having made any efforts to ensure that the student has learnt anything correct. Most of them simply hand-wave arbitrary things knowing that most students fearing back-reaction from the prof. in terms of bad marks and grades will not question. They produce students who have grown up listening to such hollow lectures full of erroneous ideas and they become teachers for the next generation and the cycle continues. There is no feed-back mechanism where things get corrected just as there is no check on a minister for those 5 years he is power. In the end what India is left with is a completely dilapidated education system in which it is solely a good student's credit if she/he has been able to learn something correct. And it is only best that we don't talk of the state of primary education in India...I wonder whether it "educates" anyone.

As a by-product we have a huge section of the youth in the colleges of India given to drugs and alcohol. Millions of potential thinkers and workers for India drowning their talents in narcotics. Unemployment in India is not just a result of growing population of India but is very much growing from the fact that the Indian youth is today devoid of thoughts and creativity but soaked in alcohol.

This nation with a corrupt education system and a lost youth CAN NOT fight terrorism.

We as Indians have weakened ourselves in every way we could have morally, physically and intellectually. We have built a nation where the youth neither thinks nor speaks the truth. We have created a nation where each and every person is in some way or the other afraid of falling out of favour with someone, student from the teacher and teacher from the head of the department or employee from the boss and the companies from the ruling party and the politicians from the part leader and so on the chain continues.

India is a nation built on favouritism going back to the times when the rajas and maharajs gave privileges or the Britishers bribed Nawabs etc with titles of "Rai Bahadur". We as a nation have never thought of attaining anything without favouritism and what hence we have a nation which never speaks the truth but only continues to try to be diplomatically correct so that she/he is socially well-off.

What better state than this could a nation be to be a soft target for the terrorists! With this factious state of affairs we have made ourselves extremely penetrable to all sorts of foreign designs. It is pretty trivial to play one section of the Indian population against another and generate local support. I am pretty sure that without generating local shelters a foreign force can't operate so efficiently. Further it is not just direct support in terms of resources and information but also to some extent there has to be presence of elements who render moral support.

Its only surprising that not all the terrorist groups across the world don't have their head quarters in India!

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 1) {Is it a nation of 1 billion people called "India" that is fighting terrorism together? }

2009-01-06T01:07:00.001+05:30

Recently it was reported that the ninth child, a girl, of a certain poor family in Bihar was sold by their parents to someone in exchange for a few square meals a day. I am sure it is one of the millions of such incidents in India which got reported. Its a country where poor daily wage labourers sell their blood for 500 or 1000Rs per bottle to earn a living and many people sell one of their kidneys for 50,000 to 1lakh rupees to stay alive.

This is my India that hopes to fight cross-border terrorism!

I find it ridiculous to say the least and obviously the only thing that comes from the prime-minister and the defence minister post 26/11 are a few hollow shouts at Pakistan. Isn't there a fat chance that the Indian government acted meekly against Pakistan sponsored terrorism simply to preserve their Muslim vote bank in India?Can't forget that the elections are knocking at their door!

Pakistan almost making a joke of India's calls by showing the world that it is trying to curb state sponsored terrorism by putting a few locks on the offices of some of the terrorists!

India as it stands has a completely hollowed society split under innumerable factions and it is too fragile a society in terms of unanimous thinking and this society CAN NOT fight terrorism. How is Ajmal Kasab and his men different from those doing business in India by selling kidneys, blood and doing pre-birth sex determination to kill the girl child? (whom Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen called the "Missing Women"...I wrote a blog about this some time ago )

An army fights as a group so that its organization is not infiltrated by the enemies. How can that army win a battle when its own organization is itself infiltrated by the enemies or its organization is itself crumbling due to corruption?

Let us not fool ourselves in taking pride in the elusive concept of "United Republic of India" and rusting statements about "Unity in Diversity"! "India" is just a concept that exists in pen and paper and has never existed in reality. People of this "nation" have never really thought in any unanimous way and have never thought of themselves as part of the same nation. The idea of "nationhood" has never been a part of the Indian psyche. A typical person from Kerala or West Bengal is very likely to give his first identity as a Keralite or Bengali rather than as an Indian. State identity is only one of the million possible identities that can get pre-dominance over their national identity. In some social or religious occasion, this Keralite or the Bengali might again get united under their identity of being a "Brahmin"! but even by mistake they might not unite as "Indian".

The nation called "India" is only an abstract idealization of a factious reality and the "Indian" is some fictional character.

We teach the school children very proudly about the "Revolt of 1857" and give them the idea that this supposedly "great Indian uprising" was the first organized revolt India launched against the British. I have found all these sugar-coated statements to be extremely erroneous and anyone who has read history even a little more carefully would have realized how completely disjoint the 1857 revolt was from common Indian. (not to mention the surgical door to door butchering of lakhs of Indians by the British post-revolt of those families who took part in the revolt)

1857 revolt came no where close to the French Revolution where the common man took up arms. 1857 revolt was purely a meek attempt by some local provincial kings to join forces to regain their authority over their lands. It was purely a fight by the local rulers to regain power and no one had any idea of "India" in them and they were not fighting for liberation of India.

The reality as I see today is that we still are split along the same lines as the armies in 1857 were split. Regional division is so deeply ingrained by those 200 dark years of British Rule in India that even today it takes only a little bit of spark to set one region on a blood-hunt of the other...recent example being the attack of the MNS against the candidates from Bihar!

This piece of land called "India" which is so deeply split along all sorts of local identities of caste, region, family (gharana and biradiri!), language etc is extremely vulnerable to the evil designs of any foreign power. It is trivial for foreign powers to take advantage of these local splits to infiltrate the society and create their shelters within India. Wars at the borders of India are pointless when such a split society further made desperate by killing poverty has been hacked into by the terrorists.

No wonder Al-Qaeda's recruitment advertisement tapes were found being circulated in Bihar.

And this issue of one particular identity of a person being hiked up is extremely generic to the way India works. "Those are Muslims. They are foreigners. They are terrorists" can be enough to raise many Hindus to kill Muslims in India irrespective of their profession whether she/he had another identity as a scientist or farmer or a clerk in a bank. Similarly many Christians in Orissa can probably now be made to kill Hindus by properly instigating their religious identity and telling them that "These Hindus have burnt your churches and priests". Indians have become extremely vulnerable to let any one of her/his identities being used as a crank to turn her/him into an instrument of terror.

At the end we have a completely divided India which is one nation only for a show and a cluster of provinces in reality with provincial heads working for personal gains. No wonder we still see politicians going to vote with their manifesto supporting a further split in India, the so called "Telengana"! And these splits have over the years given birth to numerous guerrilla warfare expert POWs (People War Groups), all of them fighting for local interests and indeed some of them have genuine reasons since various remote areas of India have always been forgotten by the government of India.

Imagine the situation if all these POWs could be motivated by the foreign terrorist groups to join them against a common enemy the "government in Delhi". It would be a severe collapse of the already fragile nation.

As soon as Mumbai was attacked I could hear voices around me suddenly preaching 2 ideas:

1. All Muslims be removed from India. It is impossible to live with them. They are anyway culturally so disjoint from us.

{I would rather kill myself than see people like A.P.J Abdul Kalam, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulzar, Amjad Ali and Zakeer Hussain thrown out of India because they are muslims!}

2. Let all Hindus assemble themselves into Hindu terror outfits which shall counter Muslim terrorism. Let the hard liners of Hinduism motivate all Hindus in India to form such military organizations. Even one former MP seemed to preach such similar ideas in an article in the newspaper Indian Express.

{I can't remember hearing more stupid ideas. Seems to me to be the perfect idea for Hindus to create a Frankenstein for themselves. I would like to put this very strongly that Hindu hard lined organization is NOT an answer to Muslim terror groups. It would be suicidal to say the least.}

But obviously one can't deny that most terror outfits in India are Islamic groups and clearly claim religion to be one of their main motivating factors. It is definitely necessary that the India government does a crackdown on all possible places and means through which such Islamic terrorist groups could be operating. Such an operation should definitely include all Mosques and Madrasas which have at various times been used as bases for terror groups. And we every now and then hear that many Madrasas are being used by terror groups as their training centers.

But now this would be extremely stupid if such a combing action gets interpreted by someone as an attack by Indian government against Muslims. One should be ready to look beyond every human emotion for the sake of national security.

But welcome to India! I am sure that many in the government would immediately oppose such a combing action since they would be afraid to lose their Muslim vote bank! This nation built on the lines of cheap politics can never hope to fight terrorism.

And then we hear further weird propaganda being carried on by various Muslim clerics outside India and there have been reports in the news papers that there are secret pamphlets getting circulated in various mosques in the Middle East which seem to say that the even though Muslims ruled India for about 800 years (Mughal Empire) it managed to convert only about 20% of India to Islam. What a shameful situation for Islam! They look at this as a great failure on the part of Islam and this is the time when this historic error needs to be corrected. Hence let us spensor terrorist groups and capture India and convert it to Islam.

Wonderful! If ever one needs an example to skewed ways of thinking then this is it!

And then from some of my friends in South India who are deeply religious about Hinduism I have heard statement like we should not count only the 200 years of British Rule as the only period of Indian history as being enslaved by a foreign power but we should count it has 1000 years including the Mughal period. They were equally foreign powers having enslaved India.

With such philosophies doing rounds in India I find it impossible to think how this nation can ever fight terrorism!

Too many cooks spoil the broth

2008-12-27T11:10:00.002+05:30

Hi again. I am back with another article. This was also published by me some months ago, but again, the idea behind the article is still relevant now. Remember a few months ago when the UPA Government was almost on the verge of collapsing? There was a heated debate on the Indo-US nuclear deal and the Leftists ultimately withdrew support to the Government prompting the Samajwadi Party to renew contacts with the Congress. Well, this post is related to the happenings in the Indian Parliament at that time; so, refresh your memories a little. [:)]

"I know the title of this post does sound a little childish, but that's how our Parliament is. I'm sure many of you saw proceedings of the trust vote in Parliament today. UPA did win finally, but not before a lot of hoopla about side-switching, back-stabbing and bribing on either side. In order to survive, the Government had to woo hitherto nationally unimportant leaders like Shibu Soren by promising him a berth in Union Cabinet. Ditto with some obscure MPs from the North-East who had to be offered fancy perks. The opposition, on the other hand, had to allegedly bow to Ajit Singh's demand of naming Lucknow airport after his father [he is the leader of RLD, a party with a paltry 3-4 MPs in Parliament]. There were also reports of many of the Samajwadi MPs being successfully poached by BSP. On the other hand, TRS said that they would vote for or against the nuclear deal depending on who amongst NDA and UPA will listen to their demand of a separate state of Telangana. So, a party is deciding its stance on an inter-nation agreement depending upon what happens to their state-level demand. There are lot more of such stories doing the rounds, and one cannot say all are completely false.

I feel we're in such a mess because of existence of too many parties in India. Every time a crisis occurs, party bosses begin making groups. In the process, every party promises to support that group which will concede to it's demands. If the demands are not met, the party removes support and tries to break the group and form a new one. So essentially our democracy is about group-making, putting some idiotic regional/local issues as conditions for support, having endless negotiations and ultimately breaking up because after all, not everyone's demands can be met. When shall we get time to do constructive work after all this? Our democracy spends more time in making and breaking alliances and debating. Instead, if there were only 2 or a maximum of 3 parties [as a rule], wouldn't we be more productive? Look at USA's democratic model. In our country, if a leader like Raj Thackeray feels "hurt" or "neglected" in a regional party like Shiv Sena, he leaves the party and forms an even smaller outfit like MNS. And it is parties like these which have 2-3 MPs up there who become the deal-makers or breakers in crucial situations like the nuclear deal. The sad thing is that they do not take decisions based on what's good for the country, but on how much effective their actions will be for their local level petty politics."

A Friendly Rebuke of "A Lesson on American Politics"

2008-12-19T23:11:00.003+05:30

When reading the informative article posted by Pratish Gandhi, I noticed some discrepencies that, given my experience as an American, needed a little bit of tweaking.

Article 1, when speaking of major parties..

The two party system in America is a farce. There is one party, and it is a two headed snake called the Business party, which masquerades as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. When push comes to shove, the vast majorities of Democrats and Republicans side with big business. Our two party system is so undemocratic that when Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney (Independent ticket and Green party tickets respectively) attempt to run for President, they are forced to sue some states just to get on the ballot. American campaigns are fueled by money. Third party candidates are forced to spend the majority of the paltry sums of money they are able to collect, (due to the Media's snubbing of them, as well as the all out war that the Democrats and Republicans constantly wage against them), on lawsuits. The goal of the lawsuits is to simply be allowed to have one's name on a ballot, the Democrats and Republicans have made it extremely difficult legally to run on a ticket other than RNC or DNC. And so I must say that there is plenty of favoritism, autocracy and dynastic politics in America. With a special note on dynastic politics, I should say that the introduction of Caroline Kennedy for appointment to Senator Hillary Clinton's soon to be vacated seat is preposterous. Never in her life has she demonstrated an interest in politics, and in fact she has displayed a disdain for them, if she wants the seat she should campaign for it and earn it in 2010. I should also note that a recent poll of New Yorkers has shown that Andrew Coumo has popular support over Kennedy, it would be a gross affront to constituents if she was put there simply because of her father's and uncle's legacy (though the differences in the Kennedy's domination of American politics are markedly less then the Nehru-Gandhi domination of Indian politics).
Article 4, of debates..

The three level Presidential Debate system is a mediocrity. They ban all third party candidates from participating, (and I should add that Independence party candidate Ralph Nader was denied entrance even to watch the affair, in spite of the fact that he had an admission ticket, he was told by police that he would be arrested if he didn't vacate the premises), they are blocking off a whole segment of options to the American people. Third party candidates won't raise nearly enough money to compete in an election if they cannot even be seen with the more 'prominent' participants of an election whether they are Democrats or Republicans. There was no semblance of intelligence at most of the Presidential and especially the Vice Presidential debates this year. The candidates constantly lied, twisted facts, or dodged questions, most famously when Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin told Senator Biden, "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear". While some of the candidates are very well read and are good debators, Barack Obama initially during the primaries (he owes Hillary Clinton quite a bit of thanks for steeling him during the debates), Sarah Palin and John McCain throughout the campaigns seemed very unlearned (since they were constantly dodging questions, or the answers they gave had nothing to do with the questions). And there is a significant chance of the wrong guy becoming President. Even after all that Bush has wrought upon the world and America, a huge segment of the population still supported John McCain who throughout the campaign differed very little from Bush. Lastly, I would add that the majority of Americans, in a recent poll, support participation of third party candidates in the Presidential Debates, but since the Debate Commission (which controls all of the large debates in America) is literally owned by the Democrats and Republicans and is a private institution, Democratic and Republican politicians go against the will of their constituents (as they so often do) and bar third party candidates from participation (and in the case of Ralph Nader as I previously mentioned, they wouldn't even allow him to sit in the audience).

Article 5, of campaign contributions..
Not too much to say on this, I would just note that Sarah Palin spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars on hair, makeup, and clothing (for her and her whole family), which to this day all of which has still not been returned to the RNC. She was told by an aide to spend 20,000 dollars on clothing, so none of the RNC or McCain campaign donors, and not even the entirety of the McCain staff for that matter, was aware of her spending spree, quite a good use of campaign funds don't you think?

Americans aren't stupid, they simply are lacking in the following: the option of electing a good candidate, the option of watching all participants in elections at debates, the will to change the system (as it would be a daunting endeavor), and the proper tool to remind elected officials (in years that they aren't worried about campaigns) who they work for.

-Please forgive the numerous grammatical errors and run on sentences.
*Please don't hesitate to comment or ask for sources, I will do my best to produce them for you.

Reform Our Electoral Process--Save Indian Democracy!

2008-12-19T16:37:00.010+05:30

Reform Our Electoral Process: Save Indian Democracy!

Of many things that concern us as Indians today, the foremost one is the state of our political leadership. This was evident when hundreds of thousands of people across the country came out in streets to question the very basis of our democratic system—the political leadership of this country. Public outrage knew no bounds as banners like ‘We would prefer a dog visit our house than a politician’ made their way in street manifestations. It all makes us wonder what has gone wrong in this country, and what can be done to save it from anarchical rule. The root of the problem lies in our electoral process, which is in a desperate need of reform.

Here is an eye-opening model that explains how our rulers are not true representatives of our people, thus rendering our democracy toothless and giving rise to problems like corruption and communalism. This calls for striking at the root of a flawed system.

A hypothetical example of general election scenario in India can make the point clear:

Suppose, there was 55% voting for a Lok Sabha seat (which is the usual average), also let us assume that four candidates contested from the constituency, thus dividing the vote-bank. Candidate A, with 18 votes is declared as a winner MP.

Explanations:

· The winning candidate gets less than 20% support from the total voting population. In the case of a coalition government the ruling party comes to power with less than 15% support of total voting population.
· Nearly half the voting population does not cast its vote—out of sheer lethargy and hopelessness. One of the prime reasons being that many a times none of the candidates are found suitable for the post.
· The difference of votes between the winning candidate and the next best candidate is merely 5 to 10%.

Implications:

· Our elected political leaders cannot be held as true representatives of our people.
· People have begun to lose their faith in our democratic processes and the leadership that it produces. This is a dangerous trend for the survival of any democracy and needs to be reversed not through more promises but through result oriented action.
· The root of many Evils: While most of us people genuinely care for an honest, development oriented government, it is the manipulation of marginal 5-10% votes that can drastically swing election results. The manipulation comes in many forms: politics of division, communalism, violence, pressure tactics, buying votes, handing out liquor and other sops, bogus voting etc. Winning an election becomes a wealth and power game, giving rise to a spiral of corruption and mal-practices at all levels of the system. Candidates that cannot draw those decisive marginal votes through above mentioned illegal practices; stand little chance of winning an election.
· The above model proves that with less than 15 to 20% support from total voting population, a political party can hope to come to power / share power in a coalition form of government. Each party therefore strives to carve a ‘niche’ for itself in the voter’s market. The focus of our democratic system thus shifts to vote-bank politics, fragmenting our nation into narrow minded self-interests rather than developmental issues that ought to take center-stage in any election.
· The political equations force many of our well-meaning leaders and potential candidates to either opt out of the political system, or continue to take the ‘rogue’ route. In the long term, it serves nobody except the system itself.

Solutions:

The people of India, including our political leadership, have become victims of a system that tends to reward corruption, divisive politics and ferocity. Therefore, we all need to unite together to reform the system itself. Proposed are a set of revolutionary changes in our electoral process that hold tremendous potential to give more meaning to our democracy.

· Make voting compulsory to all above the age of 18. This is a fundamental duty of every citizen. Punitive measures such charging a fine or denying certain public privileges to those who do not vote without a genuine reason need to be enforced. This will make our democracy truly representative and participative one.
· With compulsory voting, comes the right to cast a negative/neutral vote i.e. the option to choose ‘none of the candidates’ as a deserving candidate to get elected. In case this option gets majority voting, all the contesting candidates shall be denied the right to run for the same post for at least next 5 years and there shall be a re-election. This will ensure that only quality candidates contest the election.
· It shall be made a pre-requisite for a candidate to win a minimum of 30% of total votes in order for him/her to get elected for the post, which will mean that candidates will contest the election on the basis of inclusive developmental issues, for the larger good. The divisive vote-bank politics will have no place in such a system. This becomes all very important to unite the people in a diverse country such as ours.

A beginning can be made by enforcing these reforms in one state as a pilot project.

Conclusion:

Indian democracy, despite many of its flaws, has survived six decades of existence thanks to many of its innate strengths. It is time we leap ahead to build on these strengths and correct the existing flaws. Revolutionary legislation such as the Right to Information has proven how a systematic change can bring about a positive impact in our governance. It is very much possible in our lifetime to strengthen the system, if only we rise up collectively and make our voice heard.

Please: Contribute your views on http://www.reformourdemocracy.blogspot.com/

To be sent to: The Election Commission of India and all concerned change-makers.

--Vipul Shaha, Baramati, Business Graduate from Symbiosis International University, Pune
vipulshaha@gmail.com

A lesson on American politics..

2008-12-18T22:09:00.004+05:30

I had published this post on my blog a few months ago, but I guess the content is absolutely valid on this forum. In it, I talk about the good aspects of the American democratic system, and what we should incorporate into our system. Of course, theirs is a different society, with different capacity and probably with slightly different ideals. But we can definitely learn from them and pick and choose what suits our system.

"What can be called as a good election? As America votes on Nov. 4 to elect their new leader, in the midst of all the politically charged speeches, huge public rallies, glitzy TV ads and unprecedented patriotic fervor, I guess only an outsider like me will think of such a question. I have been following the the election proceedings for so many months now, and I have only praise for it. Polls repeatedly suggest that the Democrats are heading towards a massive win, but nobody can firmly say much. I don't want to get into who is better suited to win the election for two reasons - firstly, because it's hardly going to change my life in any direct way (!), and secondly, I am no political pundit to write about it! There are many capable men round the world who are doing this job right now!

But I can definitely write about the positives of this election from a 3rd person's point of view. Here they are -
1) The way each major party (there are 2 to be precise, and I am a major advocate of this idea) chooses it's Presidential candidate is commendable. There are inter-party primaries in which candidates contest against each other and the winner is selected in a fully democratic fashion. This hardly leaves any room for favoritism, autocracy and "dynastic" politics.

2) Most of the law-makers there are either Democrats, Republicans or Independents. However, they do not blindly follow the party diktat; if they disagree on some issue, they won't budge to oppose it openly. These actions are not overtly opportunistic either. Take for example Colin Powell's (Secy. Of State under George Bush Jr.) endorsement of Barack Obama as President; or Alan Greenspan's (who considers himself a "Libertarian Republican") (Chairman of the Fed. Reserve who served under George Bush Jr.) comments about Bill Clinton, a Democrat, being the best President he worked for. Ditto with Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who went to the RNC to endorse McCain in this election.

3) The DNC (Democratic National Convention) and RNC (Republican National Convention) are very big events there, and are telecast on TV just the way a football match would be. What struck me most about these events was not just the grandeur or the candidates' fiery speeches, but the fact that these leaders make it a point to introduce their families to the public. They make sure the public knows what their family members do, big or small, and that they themselves are family-oriented candidates.

4) The 3-level Presidential Debate system is a very good feature. Sponsored by the 'Commission of Presidential Debates', these debates are telecast on TV and watched by literally millions of people. The content of the debates is completely relevant to the pressing problems Americans face, rather than stupid personal accusations and political talk. Common people like us send their questions beforehand, and the best of them are posed to the candidates. This not only gives the people a clear idea of the contestants' experience and education, it also tells them what stand they are taking on various issues. The candidates also appear extremely well-read because of the way they present their points and give statistics to counter the opponent. Their views and utterances are scrutinized sometimes by the media to the point of ridiculousness. From the point of view of Americans, there is really very dim scope of the wrong guy becoming the right guy (George Bush is an exception, though!).

5) Political parties have very effective ways of lapping up supporters and volunteers. Also worth noting is the open-ness of campaign funding. There is remarkable transparency about how much money has been collected, how it is being used, who all has contributed etc. By this, the people not only know who has advantage, but also how their donated money is being used. A snapshot of the campaign money different candidates managed to collect (From the NY Times)-

The money is also used in a decent way. They spend it on
a) Hiring well qualified finance experts, foreign policy experts and election managers who tutor them.
b) Ads which are almost completely substance oriented
c) Creating highly informative websites for the people to make their decision (snapshot attached. From www.alexa.com)

A very good system is public donation to campaigns. Eg: Axelrod's (Obama's campaign adviser) elaborate use of the Internet helped Obama to organize under-30 voters and build over 475,000 donors in 2007, most of whom were Internet donors contributing less than $100 each (source- Wiki). As a passing remark, it's worthy to mention that Barack Obama broke all previous records of campaign money collection.

6) The poll ratings are pretty much correct, if not perfect.

All this dispelled some misconceptions about the common American that I had. They are not fools as much as they appear to be. When it comes to the matters most important, they are very clinical and careful. As far as Presidency goes, after such exhausting campaigns in which they dissect each word and expression of yours, one may wonder if the winner is even left with the energy to run the 'mess' for 4 years. But history shows they do. It is a tough test, but that's precisely the reason why you come to be regarded as the most powerful person on the planet."

Welcome from Pratish..

2008-12-18T21:45:00.002+05:30

Hi all,
I am Pratish Gandhi, a native of Pune presently studying Maths and Comp. Science at CMI, Chennai. I won't spend much time introducing myself on this forum because this ain't a personal blog, but a blog with a mission.

The articles here shall be serious,thought provoking (hopefully!) and will be aimed at exchanging ideas,views and in general, establishing a national consensus on issues related to our democracy. This entire exercise should generate an unstoppable momentum; a voice which will be the voice of the common people like you and me; something which would have to be taken note of by the political class of India. If you're very keen on knowing about me and my life, visit this personal blog of mine - http://pratishgandhi.blogspot.com.

Now enough of my personal advertisement [;)]. Let's get started. I welcome you all to this forum. I request you all to actively contribute. At the same time, I also sincerely hope that people will respect each other's views and not get into accusations and personal taunts the way I get to see in the comments' section of popular websites like Youtube.