Please God, let us have bye-elections!!

The prayer of every voter in Tamilnadu now is, "Please God, let us have bye-elections in our constituency. All because of the wonderful way the political parties took care of the needs of the voters in the Thirumangalam constituency near Madurai! As I type this blog, it is announced that DMK party's candidate won the election. That is immaterial, all the voters seemed to have gained quite a lot much before the results were announced!

As I was losing hope on parliamentary democracy, and even was wondering about the merits of American kind of presidency (more about it later), came the news about the way our major Tamil political parties attended to the numerous needs of the voters of Thirumangalam.

Money and materials were doled out like anything to all the voters. We have heard earlier about money being distributed on the eve of the elections. But, this time, party functionaries went far far beyond all that. It was a festival and people were "taken care of" in all aspects. Women getting sarees, Men getting dhotis, younger generation went for mobile phones. Of course, men got tokens which they can 'encash' it in liquor shops.

Families got food free for a few days. The only thing, it seemed, is to wait for someone to come home canvassing for votes. There is a rumour that women got laddus, with a golden nosering hidden in some laddus. Lucky ones will get it.

On the election day, things reached the climax. All the party functionaries were sporting new clothes, went from house to house (later from booth to booth), invited people to come to the polling stations with traditional 'arathi', bindhi (kumkumam), sandal paint, betel leaves and what not - with a wide grin requesting them to vote for their candidate. Vehicles plied all through the day carrying voters from their house to the polling stations, and back.

After voting also, the voters may be tired. So, they were given tokens with which they can buy food and cool drinks, for free.

Power of a vote! I feel, there are some lessons from this entire episode for policy makers worried about rural development. The election commission officials tried to play spoilsport briefly - by making noise about parties giving money and all that sort of rot. Instead, they should make it a policy to use elections for the benefit of the voters.

They must schedule elections in such a way that political parties are given time to 'attend' to the needs of the people - one after the other. They should not hold elections in all the constituencies in one shot. The poorer the area, the later should it be or should happen a few months before the national elections - like it happened in Thirumangalam. Because, there are quite a few reports of women having enough money now given by the parties there that they got back many of their mortaged items and jewels from banks. The cooperative banks' records there vouch for this.

I am sure the voters of Thirumangalam will be missing terribly the buzz of the elections from now onwards - and their only hope for the future will be to have one more such bye-election! I am completely with them in their prayers....