We cannot afford to miss taking note of NOTA vote

 

SO, AFTER a long time, the city of Nagpur has an elected body of corporators. It will now have a Mayor and a Deputy Mayor and a Standing Committee Chairman (with financial powers). So, the people will have their ‘own’ representatives to take care of civic matters. All this is welcome. Even as the city was still in celebratory mood, the loosefooter went around meeting people randomly to asses the actual mood. Though everybody felt happy that there is an elected body in the municipal corporation, large question-marks did emerge from the multiple conversations -- about the manner of management of the civic issues, about the wrongly designed fly-overs and roads and sidewalks and intersections. “I did cast my vote, all right, but my questions still linger. I really, really, don’t know if the new body will have the time and inclination to solve the critical civic issues with diligence. When I reached the EVM, I wondered if I really should cast my vote , or return without doing it.

 

I did not choose NOTA, but had half my mind in that favour,” said a middle-aged, high-ranking corporate executive (urging the loosefooter not to reveal his name). This brings us to the question of NOTA -- None Of The Above. Nagpur registered much more than a lakh of NOTA votes. For the party that won the elections, such a number may not mean much. And for the parties that did not make it, the NOTA number would not have made much difference. But should that mean that the city’s leadership -- political or apolitical -- ignore the hugely ballooned NOTA votes ? This question needs a serious consideration -- since it raises serious question-marks on the democratic method. The city had its civic elections after a long time (along with 28 other municipal corporations in Maharashtra), and yet there were big numbers of people unwilling to choose anybody from the field.

 

his phenomenon cannot be ignored. For, it can be treated as a reflection of what the people had been seeing for the past some years -- the city caught in the throes of haphazard construction of public infrastructure worth thousands of crores of rupees. The common people were asking serious and angry questions to the political workers who went to public for election campaign. They were also expressing their sense of hopelessness about how the city had been managed -- during the full working of the elected body, and the subsequent truncated version that operated through bureaucracy. And their overall experience was not a happy one. Hence their questions.

 

Hence the massive increase in NOTA voting, as well. Hence the loosefooter’s insistence that the NOTA phenomenon must be considered in all seriousness. The loosefooter welcomes the elected representatives with open arms. Yet, as a watcher of civic affairs of the city for well over fifty years as an active journalist, he has certain issues that need an urgent resolution. That is the reason why he has taken the massive rise in NOTA voting as a point of reference -- for a sustained civic discourse (as part of our democratic exercise). n