Display deadline extension
Thursday, July 05,2007
The Election Commission may have extended the draft electoral roll's display deadline by a fortnight to July 18. But it remains a big question mark if this would help the refiguring of over 20 million voters on the list who have cleanly disappeared from the draft roll. The commission says that it has made this extension in view of the flooding that has caused large-scale people's displacement rendering them in no position to go to the display centres to check their enrolment. But the general complaint is that its display centres more often then not remain closed and their staffs absent. In spite of that common complaint, there has been no improvement in their functioning and the public grouse on this account still persists even in the areas that have not been blighted by rains or flooding. Obviously, the election authority has taken no notice of this commonplace complaint. Unless it puts in remedial measures effectively, even this extension would do no good to the health of its electoral roll. Nonetheless, one reason that threatens to keep the roll marred is the public apathy. The citizens by and large are showing no particular enthusiasm to check the lists, seek corrections in it or to get themselves enrolled. Their lukewarmth may have many reasons to it. This may have to do with raging illiteracy and even lack of awareness among them. More worryingly, it may be the manifestation of popular discontent with the system, which increasingly is coming to be viewed as serving only the elites, not the commoners. Whatever it is, the citizens obviously need to be persuaded and motivated to take interest in this task. Expecting this from the Election Commission is like asking for moon. An authority that is failing in keeping its own display centres trim and tidy could be the last to hope of that it would walk an extra mile for motivating the voters to scrutinize the draft for any corrections or for persuading the new eligible voters to get enlisted. It is a typical bureaucratic setup that moves in a typical bureaucratic fashion. This kind of ground motivational drive is thus just beyond its pale. This probably is not even in the purview of the richly-foreign-funded NGOs. Their donors may have tasked them only to raise a furor, as they are presently engaged in, over the inadequacies and infirmities of the commission's draft roll by hosting seminars and worships in deluxe five-star hotels and issuing bombastic press statements and spurious surveys to the media. But the donors seem to have kept out the citizens' persuasion and motivation part from their advocacy charters. In this task, the political parties can play a very big role. And it really is quite perplexing why are they sitting so idle, except for making customary noises, when an accurate and up-to-date roll is so vital to their own interests and especially when some of them are even asserting that thrown out of the draft are their own committed voters. If they are not keeping their assertion as a reserve to decry their defeat if that happens to come about, they must exert themselves hard to bring out the people from their homes, have them examine the draft roll and point out any rectification needed, and also goad their new eligible voters to get themselves enrolled. Given our peculiar socio-cultural conditions, an extraordinary effort is needed to produce a credibly accurate and up-to-date voters list. The major effort, arguably, has to be made by the political parties to this end. It is just unrealistic and irrational to expect this from the Election Commission.
http://www.thefrontierpost.com/News.aspx?ncat=ed&nid=59