What Indian voters want

In India, the elections happen every five years. On a single day of reckoning, the result is announced, and a new parliament takes over the country for the next five years. If politics has to have any real meaning, then these next five years and what is doled out to voters in these next five years becomes more important than the voting and elections. If the public had a perfect memory and catalogued what they got in the last five years, the voting patterns and the results would be far different from those that hit the headlines as of now.

Indian elections 2019 are on right now, and let us take a cross-sectional view of where elected politicians must concentrate if they were true to their salts and conscience. Consider walking through the middle of New Delhi, the capital city of India, and your nose would be suddenly stricken by a stench so unbearable that you would feel like fleeing the area. The source is a wide-open drain emitting a lethal mix of methane, carbon monoxide & hydrogen sulphide 24/7 and 365 days. Thousands live for miles along the banks of the drain, and millions pass by the roads built across the drain risking health and lives. The drain has been as it is for decades.

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Judiciary has millions of cases in pendency in various courts in India. Justice is delayed and then, invariably denied as a decision may lose relevance by the time it arrives. Indian courtrooms are model examples of what is called dilapidated and ill-kept covered spaces. Lower courts are sometimes called pathetic. Justice is delayed but not denied often gets defeated. There are no concerted moves to staff and maintain judicial systems. Instead, you may find litigants finding relief in long-delayed cases if they wish to maintain the status quo.

Even a laudable move like introducing an act to enforce the right to information (RTI) is languishing big time. Public organizations, against whom all Indian citizens can file applications seeking information on defined issues, are using the machinery to hide information and protect their officials if the information found is harmful to such officials. Pendency is eating into the roots of the system. Official machinery associated with this act disposes of the applications to reduce pendency and is found more siding the public organization rather than honestly ferret out information out of the public organization.

There are many other cross-sectional views, which we shall cover in this ensuing series.

By SGupta

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