Skip to main content

Are Paper ballots the answer?



The Congress has asked the Election Commission to return to paper ballots since the EVMs have chosen to be Every Vote for Modi.  While the paper ballots may exorcise the spectre thrown up by the deus ex machina, will it help the Congress?

The real tragedy of the country is that it offers no respectable alternative to the craftiness of the Modi-Shah combo.  Rahul Gandhi has grown up in the last couple of years but is still a dwarf beside the colossal images of the crafty combo.  All others of any significance are mere local patriarchs with no national appeal. 

Moreover, instead of fighting the communal card played by the BJP and its allies, the Congress is also showing communal fangs when required.  It has always been an opportunistic party from the time of Indira Gandhi when it comes to religious sentiments.  It kept on appeasing certain sections of the country’s population merely for the sake of winning votes.  The appeasements really achieved nothing more than votes for the party; the people’s living standards did not improve.  At best, a few corrupt leaders of the different communities benefitted by the Congress policies.  Corruption became the hallmark of the party in every sense of the term.  The party leaders became corrupt and it corrupted many others too. 

Hence the people of India voted for the Party with a Difference.  Unfortunately that party proved to be worse with the radical communalisation of the country into the Saffron Brigade versus antinational theme.  Worse, the party has seeped into every major national institution.  It has begun to corrode the secular fabric of the nation.  If the Party with a Difference comes to power again in 2019, which is very likely in spite of the recent setbacks in the UP-Bihar by-elections, India will cease to be India.  It will become Hindustan.  The entire history of the country from pre-historic times will be rewritten in an unbelievably short span.  Communities of people will be wiped out in mob lynching and sporadic arson. 

There is no alternative apparently.  But  despair is not a solution.  Maybe we need to take a leaf out of the Aam Aadmi Party’s experience in Delhi.  The people of Delhi chose to give their mandate to Arvind Kejriwal in spite of his initial bungling.  He is doing wonders in that state bringing free electricity and free water to the deserving.  He has made government hospitals and schools exemplary.  He brought excellent governance without making undue fuss about it, without spending crores of the taxpayer’s money on blowing his own trumpet.  Maybe, India should give a chance to Rahul Gandhi now, especially now that many of the corrupt Congressmen have already joined the BJP.  Maybe, Rahul will indeed be a much better alternative.



Comments

  1. Well, paper ballots are not really a viable solution to the rigging of the elections in India. All the same, whatever can be done for improvement, should be done. The Election Commission, like many other agencies, is no longer a reliable autonomous constitutional body and has become a puppet in the hands of the rulers at the centre. Rahul has leart and is still learning but he is far from perfect. His capability to deliver is still not visible. All the same, he deserves a chance now. Arvind Kejriwal has done and is still doing a laudable job despite the fact that a bureaucrat titled as the Lieutenant Governor has been left after him by the central government who does not do anything except blocking his path and harassing him almost everyday and in almost everything attempted by him. His courage deserves admiration. Rahul Gandhi also can try to win people's hearts without crying for the manipulation through the EVMs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not only the Election Commission but also all other government machinery has been made subservient to BJP interests. That's the genius of Modi-Shah combo. They have subverted the entire system. Like China's Xi, these two will declare themselves the emperors of India soon unless the people vote them out next year.

      Delete
  2. Things are indeed going from bad to worse. The saffronisation of secular India needs to be stopped quickly.

    To their credit, I think the NDA has managed to take some tough and necessary decisions (not the idiotic demonetisation) since coming to power. I do not have any realistic hopes of good leadership and vision from RaGa, but at least he would have a ready set of veterans and better-abled administrators, with a sound philosophy to take the country forward.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Rahul will have to depend on advisers. Ultimately the intentions matter more than cleverness.

      Delete
  3. Before coming to power,Chandra babu demanded paper ballot instead of EVMs.Now he remains calm.Both Congress and BJP lost their credentials for different reasons.Something new should be happened.It's high time.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, neither of the two parties enjoys credibility. But who is capable of starting a new party?

      Delete
  4. Sir, your writeups are really impressive. We are a law portal www.legalbites.in Kindly send me your contact details at contact@legalbites.in

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af