Dharmendra Jore: Wake up, young graduates

Political awakening does not merely mean holding views on leaders and parties that we discuss casually in the drawing room. Our paramount and result-oriented national duty is to get registered in the electoral rolls and go out to vote on polling day. It is also a call of duty, in particular, for urban and educated individuals who hold a degree from any university in the country.

A college degree and politics? You may ask, what connection do these two have? In Maharashtra, university graduates have the constitutional right to elect seven MLCs out of the 78-member Upper House. Mumbai and rest of the Konkan segments will have the graduates' constituency elections on June 25 this year. Now I ask: how many of you knew of the existence of such a constituency and election?

Analytics of past elections show a discouraging trend, despite the fact that our state has the highest number of graduates. Mumbai tops the cities with the highest number of graduates, and it will have an opportunity to elect its exclusive MLC. But across the city - covering 36 Assembly constituencies - only 60,000 graduates have registered, and that's less than the previous year. As a rule, the electoral rolls for graduates must be made new ahead of every election held after six years. This means, you cannot register just once and then forget about it.

In the neighbouring Konkan, with Thane as its hotbed, and home to many prospective candidates, the response goes further down. It's the candidates or their parties that go out to register the voters; a miniscule number of graduates register on their own. The scene remains somewhat the same in five other constituencies of Pune, Nashik, Nagpur, Amaravati and Aurangabad, where elections will be held later.

The dark side
Over the years, political parties have taken over the Upper House, be it in Parliament or the state legislature, defeating the original purpose - representation of elders or people who can impact policy, keep the lower houses in control and be the face of democratic values. Graduates' constituencies have been grabbed by political leaders and their kin. A rookie who has no political backing cannot stay in the race because of a lack of resources. It does not matter how good a public representative s/he could be, if elected. The upper houses offer more time for representatives to speak on the floor, because there are fewer members. Whereas, in the lower houses, time is a commodity that only a privileged few (senior leaders) have access to. Over the years in Maharashtra, the quality of debates has deteriorated in the Upper House as well, because of poor representation by learned people.

Youth power
Can you imagine how many graduates Mumbai and Thane/Konkan have churned out in the last three years? They should now be 24 to 25-year-olds, pursuing further studies in the face of bad management by universities or lack of employment. Don't they deserve a voice? Shouldn't they play a role in replacing incompetent representatives who do not raise their issues before the government? The young must ask their parents, siblings and extended families to enrol. Pinning down a 'failed' representative is not very difficult in this class, because of the small size of the vote bank. You can share your thoughts with your representative and tell him or her what is going wrong. After all, this is the era of social media dominance, led by the young.

How to enrol
Anyone who is a resident of a particular constituency, and has earned a degree three years before the date of notification of the elections, can register as voter. To know more, click on https://goo.gl/WBXxjS. It's a hassle-free process and you don't even need any notarised papers; self-attested documents should suffice. Isn't it cool?

Dharmendra Jore is political editor, mid-day. He tweets @dharmendrajore Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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