{"id":3333,"date":"2012-02-20T23:26:47","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T17:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/calamur.org\/gargi\/?p=3333"},"modified":"2012-02-20T23:26:47","modified_gmt":"2012-02-20T17:56:47","slug":"dna-column-why-mumbai-has-a-poor-voting-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calamur.org\/gargi\/2012\/02\/20\/dna-column-why-mumbai-has-a-poor-voting-record\/","title":{"rendered":"DNA Column – Why Mumbai has a poor voting record"},"content":{"rendered":"

My column in today’s DNA<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0When the BMC election results came out, pundits on main stream media as well as social media asked if the voting turnout (46%)was\u00a0 an indication of the city that was apathetic. Actually it is not. Other metros have equally terrible turn outs. The voting ratio this time is the same as the last BMC elections. The low turn out is possibly for two reason. The first is because most do not know what their local Corporation or their local corporator does . It\u2019s all very well to get them to fix your ration card or your child\u2019s admission in the local municipal school but many in Mumbai neither use a ration card nor the municipal school system, and hence there is no value in voting in the elections. There is also a second reason \u2013 and that reason is that ward level elections are about the local community and about local community interests \u2013 roads, housing, schools, community spaces, health etal \u2013 and at a certain level the concept of community is disappearing in the city.<\/p>\n

Mumbai\u00a0 was never the city of the elite. It is not that the city did not have a\u00a0 elite, rather it had many elites \u2013 a business elite, a political elite, a cultural elite, ethnic elites, a labour elite\u00a0 \u2013 and different pockets in which these elites stayed. And in Mumbai \u2013 unlike many other metros there is social interaction not only between the various elites but the various groupings. The city is curiously egalitarian. You would not at all be surprised to walk into a \u2018family restaurant\u2019 and find a business man enjoying an evening out with his family at a table next to a worker with his family. You will find the older generations multi lingual, with multiple social circles cutting across class and community.<\/p>\n

While many of these things that make Mumbai so special still exist, they has been a gradual erosion of the community feeling. What is called the spirit of Mumbai is actually the feeling of interconnectedness and oneness. That is being gradually forgotten.\u00a0 Air-conditioned spaces cordon\u00a0 off a minority from the rest of the city. A city, whose people took \u00a0\u00a0pride in speaking multiple languages are confronted with people refusing to learn to \u00a0speak the State language. A city where the rich and the poor studied and went to the same schools, the same colleges and inhabited the same spaces are now ghettoised like other cities. And, also most startling is the unwillingness to look at the city that gives so much to people, as also the Capital of a prosperous, industrial state -Maharashtra. For many who have arrived in the city over the last decade or so, embracing Bombay the cosmopolitan metropolitan city is easy, to embrace Mumbai the capital of Maharashtra is difficult. Voting in General Elections is easy, voting for local or state elections means participating in the issues of the city and the State.<\/p>\n

Electoral democracy rests on the principle of a candidate who represents the interests of an area either in the corporation or in the assembly or in Parliament. However, the way our system is structured, while we get to have choice between candidates of various parties, the parties themselves are undemocratic. Worse, they are dynastic. You usually end up with an imposed candidate \u2013 you know nothing about, or you end up with someone standing for elections in your area purely because of their blood line. There were a large number of candidates across party lines, in the current BMC elections, who were there purely because of their association with someone else who had held power. There is, in such a case, no local connect.<\/p>\n

The second pivot of electoral democracy is the concept of \u2018nurturing\u2019 a constituency. An elected member as well as a person who hopes to be elected sets up base in a constituency and nurtures it over a period of five years \u2013 becoming accessible to people, helping solve their problems and representing their interests. However, with seats being declared as reserved at the last minute, there is no point in nurturing constituencies. You don\u2019t know if your effort will pay off. And, hence there is no local connect once again.<\/p>\n

The 54% who didn\u2019t vote are of three main types \u2013 those whose name was left out of the electoral rolls; those who don\u2019t feel a connect and therefore don\u2019t vote; and the third who care deeply and are disillusioned and don\u2019t vote. It is incumbent on the system to fix all three.<\/p>\n

For the concept of local self government to work, the local has to be put back in it. Democracy can flourish best when people participate. Political parties with their behaviour are stifling democracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My column in today’s DNA \u00a0When the BMC election results came out, pundits on main stream media as well as social media asked if the voting turnout (46%)was\u00a0 an indication of the city that was apathetic. Actually it is not. Other metros…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,56,23,28,3,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-in-msm","category-elections-india","category-india","category-mumbai","category-politics","category-society"],"yoast_head":"\nDNA Column - Why Mumbai has a poor voting record - A PoV<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/calamur.org\/gargi\/2012\/02\/20\/dna-column-why-mumbai-has-a-poor-voting-record\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"DNA Column - Why Mumbai has a poor voting record - A PoV\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My column in today’s DNA \u00a0When the BMC election results came out, pundits on main stream media as well as social media asked if the voting turnout (46%)was\u00a0 an indication of the city that was apathetic. 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