Why don’t we vote?

For quite some time, nobody believed in voting. And then came various NGOs who said that we should. This time around, we were expecting many people to turn up and vote

Why don't we vote?

For quite some time, nobody believed in voting. And then came various NGOs who said that we should. This time around, we were expecting many people to turn up and vote. They didn't.

Many people are of the opinion that one should vote and exercise this right, which is the greatest right that any democracy gives you. But time and again, we find that many people don't vote and instead treat the polling day as a holiday and feel that this day is ideal for shopping and watching movies.

As a result, many politicians are irked. In fact, Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president R V Deshpande, while expressing his concern, said that voting must be made compulsory. While we feel that he is right in spirit all people must vote it is doubtful if this can be made compulsory under law. After all, the right to vote also implies the right not to vote.

One politician who inspired people in his constituency to vote was the late Girdhari Lal Bhargav, a six-time BJP MP from Jaipur. He made his debut twenty years ago in 1989 and defeated Bhawani Singh, who was earlier the ruler of Jaipur, by over a lakh votes. And he did this winning with a margin of at least one lakh votes a total of six times.

Why did the people vote for him? At one level it could be because, in this day of fake sons of the soil, he was truly a common man's leader. He used to generally campaign on his two-wheeler, reserving his four-wheeler for rural campaigning. And unlike most leaders of today who are typically too busy to spend time with their own party workers, Bhargav would actually sit down and eat ladoos with them.

Such acts of accessibility and simplicity naturally endeared him to both his own party workers and to the voting public. In fact, to show solidarity with him, many common people would follow him when he went to the returning officer's office to file his nomination performers. Contrast this with some politicians who are accompanied only by their minions.

What I'm trying so say is that, before we force people to go out and vote, we need to create leaders whom the public want to vote for. Give them the choice between one useless corrupt leader from one party and another useless corrupt leader from another party, and then, well, who can blame the common man if he says that he is not interested in voting at all?

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