Category: Democracy

Voter Apathy in Democracies

There are many factors that affect the voter turnouts in a free democracy. Some important things are,

  1. Smaller the size of the country or constituency, better voting percentage as the local issues are not only flagged but understood well by the voters. Also they feel their exercise of franchise would make a perceptible impact in the outcome. That is why Loksabha elections might have a lower turnouts than assembly elections, while town councils would have the maximum turnouts!
  2. Economic hardships lead to apathy. Why would one keep off from their daily wages for the sake of voting! Poor countries would generally have lower voter turn outs.
  3. Economic prosperity and stability too would have their own share of higher sense of voter apathy. They feel nothing would change their life – be it Ram or Ravan.
  4. Higher Educational level too has a similar impact – can make one apathetic as nothing could change their life whom-so ever occupy the throne
  5. On the other hand, Policies that had impacted recently or that could make a massive impact, would increase the voter turnouts – due to disgust or enthusiasm. For example 1977 anti emergency. Karnataka and TN assembly elections – freebies and anti-incumbency. If there no burning issues – status quo and lower turn outs.
  6. Feeling a sense of civic duty in democracy – oh. who bothers nowadays – the less said on this the better!

Should voting be made compulsory as in some ‘democracies’? Forcing the subjects to express their ‘free will’? Sounds oxymoron???

Ok. So there are many that are keeping the voters apathetic to voting. Some local factors are not highlighted. Western press remarked, “why should india have the general elections at the peak of its summer especially when there is heat wave? The voter turnout could be awfully low!”

But so far the voter turnouts are not anyway different from other general elections. Also as our minister of external affairs rebuked, “our worst turnouts are generally better than their best”!

In a sound working vibrant democracy, the magic number seems to hover around 65% across the world! Anything lower is apathy. Even a few percentage higher could be ‘wave’!

Am I wrong?

Am I wrong, as a ‘sincere’ tax payer of this country, to object to freebies including popular waivers to ‘corner’ the votes?

On these lines, I endorse the following statement floating around in the social media:

An earnest request to all political parties from the tax payers of this country. Their poll promises for loan waivers should not be done out of the tax collections but from the respective party funds. The promises were made by the political parties and not the tax payers. Taxes are paid for the growth and development of the country and not for free distribution.

If you are concerned about the sufferings of a particular section ‘though it can be attributed’ to your failed policies, then, distribute portion of your apparent and ‘concealed’ wealth first and request others to follow….

Democracy in a society with extreme disparities

Whether democracy can survive in a world of extreme social and economic disparities?

On one hand, it is an undisputed fact that the communism would fail as the reward for success of an effort is to be shared with undeserved no one would want to try, leave alone excelling. On the other, the manner in which elected governments bailed out “fat cat” bankers by transferring the burden of austerity and welfare state cuts to the middle and working classes, left a bad taste in ordinary people of the capitalist democracies from 2008! China’s emergence as the largest economy demonstrates an alternative pathway to power and prosperity through authoritarian (totalitarian?) state capitalism.

After nearly 40 years of Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis, that predicts democracy as the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government, only 39 per cent of the world’s total population (88 out of 195 countries) live in fully “free” polities! Many of them are under veiled democratic (totalitarian) order. The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 that promised to usher in a possible “fourth wave” of democratisation, has sadly failed. Barring Tunisia, democratic revolts in the Middle East have been crushed by a combination of war and terrorist violence unleashed by authoritarian regimes. The European Union too could not succeed in preventing rightist populists in Hungary, Poland and Italy from openly trampling upon liberal democratic institutions. The prominent emerging democratic powers like Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa, so far have failed to inspire and transform the current world order.

Extreme economic inequality and insecurity for the have-nots have compounded the anger against the unaccountable “democratic” regimes. The association of unjust globalisation with democracy is automatic because the theoretical and practical assumption of liberalism is that democracy is the necessary political instrument of capitalism.

Is the dust yet to settle down in the seemingly peaceful world polity?

Does Aadhar create a superstate?

Have you read George Orwell’s 1984: A dystopian novel published in 1949, set in the year 1984, when the people of Great Britain, a province of a superstate named Oceania, became victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda?

Hold on, now we are 34 years late, in 2018: Chinese authorities were able to locate and arrest a man attending a concert of more than 60,000 people using facial recognition technology. China has 170 million CCTV cameras already in use across the country, establishing the world’s largest camera surveillance network, which is anticipated to add millions more over the next few years that are likely to feature forms of artificial intelligence that will include more facial recognition options. Earlier this year, officers at the Zhengzhou East high-speed rail station were provided special glasses that were embedded with facial scanning technology. William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, warned that, “The potential to give individual police officers facial-recognition technology in sunglasses could eventually make China’s surveillance state all the more ubiquitous.”

On one hand, Our PM rightfully boasts that Aadhar implementation has weeded out fake beneficiaries of the porous public distribution system, subsidised gas connection and host of other services by identifying the targeted population saving huge amounts of public money. On the other hand, the public activists suspect ‘snake being smuggled in as rope’!

Is it time to accept the inevitable that debate about privacy is now just an academic exercise in futility? We have already traded it for the convenience and glamour of technology, be it UBER, FB, WhatsApp and host of other Apps., and no amount of carping will restore it. Under public pressure, governments will no doubt provide coating of sugar and make laws to try to protect it from corporate attacks; but the irony is, that in this matter where the interests of the state and the market converge, for reasons of security and profit, respectively, the loser is the freedom of the citizen. But Some may object as ‘unlimited freedom is synonymous with anarchy’!

Our own government’s obsession with it is a matter of concern: ‘The straws in the wind are not encouraging’, as Avay Shukla (Retd Addl Secy, HP) writes in a column in today’s Indian Express. It is significant that the new draft Privacy Bill proposed by the Srikrishna Commission has a clause which exempts the government from taking consent of the individual before accessing his personal information. The government has also proposed a law which will make DNA profiling of every citizen mandatory.

This can be dangerous for individual liberty in a country where even a speech in a university or a cartoon in a newspaper or a gig by a stand-up comedian is charged as sedition. So, let us face the reality: with Aadhaar, the big brother has arrived.

Vibrant Indian Democracy

There are two sections of societies in india: 

An optimistic one would say the country is progressing inspite of a parliament where there is opposition for the sake of opposition; the media which thrives on looking through tinted glass and trained to see a rope as a snake, the large economic and social disparity that always provokes a section that any policy change as against their interests; popular slogan that minorities are oppressed; etc., 

A pessimist in the other section would say, compared to China, our progress is dismal; law and order is non-existent compared to Singapore; privacy of individual is violated; freedom is inadequate compared to the US democracy; bureaucracy, executive and judiciary are corrupt laden; environment is unclean compared to west; etc., etc.,

Both the sections are not far from the reality. There is no dearth of news for everyone on opening a newspaper. One hour with a hot coffee in one hand and a favourite newspaper on the other (sometimes in two languages)? Where else such is possible? In Singapore or US, the paper may be fat but you can peruse in five minutes or so…..

Does this all sum up to ours being a vibrant and vocal democracy? Such a diverse and free society with smiles even in dire poverty is our culture that is rarely existent in any other part of the world – I LOVE INDIA.