A Duty to Vote?

So the charade continues. I saw this ad where a guy approaches a girl in the crowd and tells his minions to bring her tea to wake her up. She angrily responds saying she’s not asleep. The guy assumes a self-righteous reprimanding tone and says “it’s election day, if you’re not casting a vote, then you’re asleep.”

Why are people so hell bent on making total idiots out of themselves? If you know the political process, if you know what forms a good policy decision, if you know what sort of economic policies are good for the country, and if you know which of the candidates seems capable of making the right choices, then yes, you should go and cast a vote.

But what if you don’t know all of this? What if all your knowledge comes from things you’ve just heard from other people who, in turn, have heard it from someone else, and so on? What if you don’t know one damn thing about the past of the candidates running for office? Would it still be wise to go and just pick someone based on half-baked decisions just because everyone says it’s your duty to vote?

Carl Sagan said, “Where we have strong emotions, we’re liable to fool ourselves.” That’s exactly what’s happening here. Someone knew just how liable people are to fool themselves. All they had to do was fill us up with the hogwash of how our voice should be heard across the nation and that we can do it with our vote, and we’re sold. Most of us don’t even think twice about what the hell our voice — which we want to resonate across the nation — should say in the first place.

How many Indians have even read, let alone understood, the Constitution of India? How many people know even half of the policies our former ministers have implemented and the effects they had on our economy? Does an average man know anything about political process beyond the widely advertised Government bans on various things?

In fact, how many “youths” remember the structure of our government that we learned in “Civics” during our school days.

Here’s a simple test: what do you think of this statement, “everyone should have easy access to home loans regardless of their income status, and the government should support banks who do poor people a noble service by helping them buy a house for their families.”

If you agree with it, you’d be doing a greater service to your country — and humanity — by staying home on election day.

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P. S.: One of my favorite columnists John Stossel has written an article on the same subject. Here’s the link in case you’re interested: http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel/a-duty-not-to-vote.html