Politicians’ apathy for professionals

By Buster

After the selection of Bangalorean Rajendra Mishra as the winner of the Lead India contest, there was a sense of hope among the educated classes that the major political parties would nominate professionally established candidates for constituencies within urban Bangalore. But all such hopes have been more or less dashed by the political class.

In our constituency, which includes one of the most up market neighbourhoods of the city that is populated by CXO level managers of MNC technology companies, the three key contenders are barely educated and struggle to converse in either Hindi or English. The secretary of our residents’ welfare association requested the three of them to visit us to share their achievements in public life and their agenda for our constituency. Quite expectedly, none of them is yet to show up. But we hear that they have all the time for voters in the slums who are being promised freebies by the dozens. The freebies will come out of the taxes that professionals pay.

Not a single major party is representative of the educated professional class who are generally left to fend for themselves as they have been denied a credible political voice. Despite the exhortations by publications and TV to go out and vote, we are faced with a Hobson’s choice.

In the end, we will end up voting for the party and not for the individual which is really a shame as Bangalore with its strong professional population has the potential of throwing up many more leaders like Mishra who can pass muster with an educated jury but probably not with insular, minimalist and generally retrogressive slum dwellers. Let’s see where our "Aam Aadmi" takes Bangalore to. We know that they have taken Indian democracy nowhere in these sixty years!

Net worth audit

One is also noticing that most of the election contenders in urban Bangalore are worth at least a couple of crores though their educational and professional attainments are hardly visible on their profiles. Many of us are wondering what really their source of income is.

Chances are that they are mostly land grabbers who have profited from the real estate boom. Some others would simply be extortionists who have managed to launder their income. Has the Election Commission never thought of auditing the net worth of contenders?

Incomplete voters’ lists

Most of our friends who have relocated to Bangalore over the last five years don’t find themselves on the voters’ lists despite having filled in applications at the revenue office.

My family and I had to seek the intervention of a high profile parliamentarian to have our names included and noticed along the way that there is a marked disinclination among lower-level government servants to keep "outsiders" out of the electoral process.

It is no different in any other state since we have lived in five Indian states in the last fifteen years. West Bengal is perhaps the worst in this respect as the entire government machinery is dictated to by the Communist party members.

To circumvent this phenomenon, the Constitution should confer a fundamental right to vote to all adult citizens, regardless of whether they appear on voters lists.