On A Loose End

Every time there is an election in India, there is a lot of speculation and anxiety amidst the media and the of course the politicians about the voter turnout. This time there was more concern and expectations in view of the Mumbai attacks last year. However the first phase of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections kicked off yesterday with the same old story. Ultimately a voter turnout between 58 - 62% was recorded. At the very outset of democracy in India, 45% voters turned up in 1952 which increased to 48% in 1957 and then 55% in 1962. Thereafter the voter turnout has hovered between 55-65%. Indian electorate i.e. the eligible voters above the age of 18, is 714 million. So a 60% turnout actually means that 285 million people do not vote and surprisingly no one is concerned. The 40% people who do not participate in the electoral process are not lazy or incapable of walking to the nearest polling booth, but are people who have lost faith in the system. They are either not happy with the candida...

The news channels as well as the news papers of the country are shamelessly covering the shameful event of Mangalore to no end. What happened in Mangalore is a major threat to the very idea of freedom. Freedom of any kind. Unfortunately this is not the first time the freedom in this country has been usurped by vested interests of some individuals, singly or collectively in a group. The politicians of the country and at times the law enforcement agencies in this country have time and again turned a blind eye to the perpetrators of such crimes and even when they have been forced to take action, which they have pretty reluctantly, they ensured that the guilty got away scot free. How impotent can a nation and her citizens get? What kind of a constitution did our forefathers make that permits gross violation and abuse of the tenets of the constitution as well as the laws of the land? Fanatic groups based on region, religion, caste, creed, language etc have been allowed to fester in this lan...

There was a news item recently that Sanjay Dutt would be the candidate of the SP (Samajwadi Party) from Lucknow in the forthcoming elections. It is hardly surprising. The Political Parties in India are only interested in winning seats, they couldn't care less about the eligibility and the background of the person. Anything as long as the person can get in the votes. Considering that Sanjay Dutt is the right man for politics. Sanjay Dutt, by Indian standards of Politicians is highly eligible for contesting elections. He does not have any college degree to boast of. He does not have any background in Politics. He has been a drug addict in his younger years. He has been convicted and sentenced to 6 years RI under the Arms act( Rigorous Imprisonment ) in the 1993 Mumbai Blasts case. Everyone knows that his acquittal under TADA was largely influenced by his sister Priya Dutt, MP of the congress party and her association with Sonia Gandhi. What else does one need to become a politician i...

On Dec 24 2008, a PWD Engineer by the name of Manoj K Gupta was lynched by a BSP MLA One Mr Tiwari and two other goons for refusing to pay Rs 50 Lakhs towards the Birthday celebration of Mayawati. The story of the Gupta Murder goes like this, the MLA along with two other men went to Gupta's house in the night, locked up his wife and thrashed him continuously for a couple of hours. Then they left the unconscious man at the police station where the MLA told the police to register a case of hooliganism against Gupta and then he walked out, You read that right, the Police did not ask him the how's and why's, they let him go. Two hours later after the Police was sure that Gupta was dead, they took him to the hospital. The autopsy report says that Gupta was given electric shocks and chunks of hair pulled out of his head, there were 32 injury marks and one arm was fractured. Mayawati straightaway denied any involvement, she went on to say that the murder was a result of profession...