Please Vote: We have a responsibility!

India, one of the largest democracies in the world with the single largest electorate, will go for polling in next few weeks for the formation of the 16th Lok Sabha. All of us must have seen the hectic and feverish activities by all stakeholders – the political parties being the largest one and the road side vendor outside Church gate station trying to boost his daily sales of party flags, being one of the smaller ones.

In many respects, as highlighted below, this electioneering process is the biggest show on earth and hence fittingly, the election commission and government machinery are keeping no stones unturned, planning day and night for a free and fair election.

Some relevant facts *:

• Electorate of 81.5 core is 4 times the next largest-US with 21.9 crore as of 2012 presidential poll.
• It is bigger than the next 5 added together- US, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and Bangladesh @74.9 crore.
• Highest number of first time voters – estimated @15 crore.
• Highest spend – pegged at Rs 30,000 crore or USD 5 Billion – all time high against all democracies in the world.
• The transgender community will vote for Lok Sabha for the first time-registered with 28,341 numbers.
• Electorate has male- female ratio @52.3%:47.6%

In this context and with this background, I strongly feel and most of you would agree that we, the literate and intellectual community (and the blogging community), have a social and citizen responsibility to exercise our vote and make our fellow citizens to do similarly on the day. I would fervently urge each of you to take up the cudgels of this duty seriously at the personal level and to the society at large at the collective level.

While all the signals to the run up to the election, so far, are showing positive signs in terms of largest new voter registrations-specifically the interest and various registration drives taken by new generation X; let’s continue the momentum to keep our fellow citizens engaged for the next few weeks – through our discussion and blogs in our own networks. The effort taken up by some television channels and some of the media houses to engage voters, are laudable in this respect. With the last date of enrollment to the electorate behind us, let us take a pledge that each of us, registered voters, will not shun our responsibility by giving the action of voting again a casual pass this time and exercise our franchise right to the best of our own reading of the situation. Let’s, for once, make time for our constitutional right rather than keeping it in our “also do” list. Let’s alter our other schedules to give “voting” a priority to enter our calendar. There is no point being indifferent to the process and then crib about everything around. India is in such a flux that common man can’t be a fence-sitter anymore.

NOTA (None Of The Above suitable) option being introduced for the first time in Lok Sabha Elections, I am not sure how we should use that choice. Should we just exercise that option to fulfill our duty remaining similarly disgusted and apathetic to the political parties and their candidates? Or should we give the mandate to someone better than the rest?

Let’s accept the fact after spending so much money from our national exchequer, we don’t want a hung parliament which is detrimental to all kinds of growth with policy paralysis – economic, political and foreign policies – to name a few among a slew of other ones.

I take this opportunity to thank IndiBlogger having arranged the blog context in the month of December dealing with how to motivate young community to the election process in association with WeChat. I sincerely hope that we implement the things that we wrote about then. As before, my take remains to be how to engage the community in issue based politics utilizing the technology available at large, for the overall success of the upcoming citizen responsibility.

To sum it up, besides the below tweet from Chetan Bhagat, my subject line says it all with my plea to this impressive community of Indian intellectuals to propagate this thought, if deemed fit.

*Sourced from Times of India

My dear friends, this appeal for voting is not my original writing, it is actually being written by Jayanta Tewari, who actually is one of my blogger friends from IndiBlogger blogging community, and who has a blog at http://jayantatw.wordpress.com/ and http://jayantathoughts.blogspot.in/ Hope you all will appreciate his appeal and will share your opinion in the form of comments below.