heartattack

Let’s say you live in a beautiful house! You have the prettiest woman in the world as your wife, and two adorable kids. Things are not safe in the city and so you and your neighbours decide to appoint a “neighbourhood watch committee” to look after the neighbourhood’s security and keep the local goons out.

But, what happens is that the neighbourhood watch committee joins hands with the local goons. The goons break into your house at night, break your legs, rape your wife, and abduct your kids, probably to sell them off to the guys who run begging rackets.

How would you feel? Betrayed? The very people you trusted to protect you from evil actually joined hands with the devil to make your life hell!

As sad as that may be, every 4 years some of us are betrayed the same way by our political parties.

Take for example, in 1997 Uttar Pradesh state elections,  some of us voted for the Bhartiya Janta Party not because we thought they were any good (In fact they had as many jokers as any other party), but to ward off the evil called Mayawati. But what happened? BJP joined hands with Mayawati’s BSP and the fat bitch became the Chief Minister of the state.

So my question is, is it fair to allow these parties to join hands with whoever they want? Is it fair for, let’s say, Samajwadi Party, to criticise the Congress party throughout their election campaign and then join hands with them just because Congress is the only party that has a real chance at forming the government?

Is it fair for the Right Wing Congress to join hands with the Left Parties and subjecting the country to a tug of war of policies at the top?

It defeats the very purpose of democracy when the political parties are not forced to obey their ‘pre-election’ stand after the elections.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, when questioned by CNN IBN recently on whether he’ll support Congress or not said that “I’ll decide after polls”. Why…. Why? Why? Why? How would the Congress party be any different after polls? So let me rephrase Mr Yadav’s words a little to reflect their right meaning

“Well, I would like to be the Prime Minister. But if my party and my allies are not able to get enough seats to have a real chance at the government, I’ll support whoever has the chance because power is all I care about”

So to follow up with the Right to Reject that I proposed in my previous post, I suggest that to make the democratic process more fair all coalitions be announced before the elections.

Thanks to the Congress-BJP rivalry, the country has pretty much 2 power blocks – the UPA (Congress + allies) and the NDA (BJP + allies). All political parties must decide to join one of the two blocks before the elections. If they choose to stay independent, they can, but then they would not have the choice to join the UPA or NDA after the elections. They have the choice, however, to make whatever slime cocktail they want to make among themselves.

To those who feel it makes no sense, I’ll be happy to hear why! Note that I’m not proposing a bi-party system. It’s just not possible to have that in India. If you look at it, it is more of a tri-coalition system. The system allows every vote to have the impact that the voter intended to have.

Yes, I agree this is still not foolproof. If SP and BSP do not decide to join any of the major two coalitions, then they can still form a coalition and the voter who voted for SP to keep BSP out is betrayed. To that, all I have to say is vote for a UPA or NDA affiliated party if all you want to do is to keep BSP out [better still, hope that the right to reject becomes a reality]. The important thing, however, is that there IS a way. In our existing system there isn’t.

But let’s not forget that such a system would let fewer and fewer parties to sit on the fence like they are happily doing now! They’ll have to take a stand, and stand by it throughout the course of the election and more importantly, AFTER it! So the next time I tie a lemon and chillies on my doorstep to ward off evil, at least I can be assured that they won’t end up in the devil’s lemonade!

Let’s say no to these humpty dumpties. Unlike the story, they don’t fall! The nation does!