“NEGATIVE VOTING”………A Revolutionary Idea And Our Right too

The general elections are almost round the corner and this whole summer we are going to witness some great nautanki from our politicians.

Social campaigns are going on….intellectuals and politicians are giving us “noble” advice that how important it is to vote. We have this “Right to Vote” stuff coming on our face!!If you don’t have that blue dot on ur finger on d day of election…u will be considered as a non-patriotic guy/gal n ppl start giving u that disgusting look …like u r criminal or some evil. Although Supreme Court once quoted “Right to Vote is not a Constitutional Right nor a Fundamental Right but pure and simple a Statutory Right”. But still we get this kind of treatment!!Also, what if we didn’t find any candidate on the EVM suitable?????????????

Also, a kind of maahol is created around we people of Bharat …like everything in these elections is in our own hands!

But are we really the Sutradhar of elections...or just puppets...Silent puppets!

This is the right time to implement “Negative Voting” in our election laws ( Loha garam hai..hathoda maar do!!). Negative voting is an option of exercising one’s Right of “Not to Vote “It gives us the freedom and option of not choosing any contesting candidate from the list if we don’t find them suitable enough. For this, only a last option is needed on the Election Voting Machine (EVM) which says “None of the above” or “I don’t want to vote for any of the above candidates” .Through this functionality we can easily use our Right to Vote…go to polling booth and vote (and not sit idle at home and criticize the whole system and India).These votes will be counted and thru this we can also show our protest publically.

Other countries too offer variants of negative voting….Nevada in US offers a negative vote option in 2006…Massachusetts included “None of the above for a new election” as an option…Europe, Switzerland, Spain, France, Belgium offers a Blank vote option.

India’s Election Commission (EC) fully supports Negative Voting. For the same, EC send proposal to Govt. of India twice, once to NDA in 2001 and than to UPA in 2004.And both the times there was no response from the govt. Nice response!!!

Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), an NGO, had filed a petition in 2004 before Supreme Court seeking separate slots in EVM’s to give voters the option of “None of the above” if s/he does not want to vote for any of the candidates standing in the election. Supreme Court accepted this petition and recommends it to its higher constitutional bench as the question involved interpretation of citizen’s fundamental rights.

But as we all expected, Govt and other political parties are against implementing Negative Voting. During hearing of the above petition, govt gave a mast excuse why not to implement negative voting…take a look

“Just as a voter holds the right to vote, s/he has also the choice of not to vote. So if s/he feels like not to vote than they should not go to the polling booth!!"

No comments….I can only laugh!!!

But as Gulzar Saab says……..”Hindustan umeed se hai!!”

Isliye hum ye umeed karte hai ki hamari ye umeed bhi naumeed nahi hogi.

Sukriya…Jai Hind!!