What should be the focus of election campaigns – personalities or policies and programmes? My candidature for the North-east Delhi Lok Sabha seat was announced by the Aam Adami Party on 1st March soon after my return from the Odisha Sociological Society Conference at Kendrapada and Rajasthan University seminar on multi-dimensional human development. I began my campaign work soon after it. Now it is one week and there are some inferences from the field-work. It is obvious that the Loksabha Elections of 2014 will be creating much heat and little light due to excessive focus upon the personalities rather than policies and programmes. Why the media is so concerned about the leaders without any reference to their mental make up, intellectual background and policy preferences? It gets closer to trivialization of a significant process like national elections for a new parliament. It makes us miss the opportunity of contributing to creating a new national consensus about the key problems and their much needed solutions. At the same time, the citizen-speakers at local community level small election meetings are not missing any opportunity of underlining the obvious. There is very little reference about various leaders in their speeches. They are asking for promise of fulfilling the need of ensuring security and dignity of people. They are reminding that provision of basic needs like water, electricity, health care, education and livelihood remain a distant dream. They are advising to avoid getting disconnected from the voters soon after the elections. It is interesting that often there are requests from women from the audience to get a chance to speak. It is equally baffling that most of the speakers are middle-aged men in an overwhelmingly young audience. Are the voters and the media are looking at two different layers of a complex reality due to different imperatives? Let us explore it someday. Online Donation Procedure: Indian citizens can donate online, by specifying Prof Anand Kumar in the ‘remarks’ section & sharing the transaction id with us through a message on Facebook, Link https://donate.aamaadmiparty.org
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 05:00:00 +0000
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