This is your time to have your say, vote for one or none

The very first feature of this election that stands out is that it seems to be excessively focused on one individual. Votes have been sought in the names of individuals in earlier elections too but the intensity of the focus on one individual seems the greater in this election than it has ever been in the past. As a matter of fact this focus on one person has prompted some people to refer to this election as more of a presidential one rather than being a parliamentary election. There have also been observations whether this is an attempt to move from a parliamentary form of government to a presidential form of government by stealth.

The second distinguishing feature of this election could be called the rise of a third force but that would be too simplistic. The so-called third force did not rise in a vacuum or all of a sudden. The roots of this broader and deeper phenomenon go back about 10 to 15 years when the first PILs were filed by some civil society groups on electoral reforms focusing on increasing criminalisation of politics. Some of these PILs resulted in the Supreme Court requiring mandatory disclosure of criminal cases and wealth of candidates. As data on these and similar such parameters accumulated, it showed that persons with criminal cases continued to contest elections, and that the wealth of candidates who contested elections repeatedly, increased way of line with any rational explanations.

This confused citizens at large on two counts. One, why did political parties continue giving tickets to persons who themselves declared under oath that they were facing criminal charges, some of them very serious; and two, how do the assets of politicians increase by thousands of percent in five years. This, combined with the passage of the RTI Act and its active use by public spirited citizens and an active media, resulting in the unearthing of what came to be called “scams”, created a sense of disillusionment in almost the entire political system in the minds of citizens at large.

On top of all this came the horrendous gang rape of a young woman in Delhi in December of 2012. The callous handling of the public outrage on that incident by the so-called “authorities” exacerbated the disillusionment, converting it in to disgust. The coming together of the aftermath of the gang rape with the anti-corruption agitation, and the way the entire existing political establishment got together to defend itself with arrogance, set the stage for exploration of a new way of doing politics.