The educated classes have voted

Lets dissect the thinking of educated classes.

1. They abhor regionalism and sons of soil policies, selective support to sons of soil policies would boomerang on a party elsewhere.
2. There are two national parties, the educated class would normally vote for either of them, the communal tag doesn't bother them but they do care about rule of law. Karnataka comes to the mind. The Pink Chaddi campaign might be dead on Facebook but not its repercussions for the BJP.
3. The BJP marketed heavily to the educated class, their marketing indeed proved to be their un-doing. If you market a bad product heavily you fail faster. Moral: You can't make promises of bribery to the educated classes and win. Their election campaign never mentioned how they'll achieve what they promised only what they want to achieve. Who do they think they were offering an equivalent of Rs. 2/Kg rice. Going one step ahead of fiscally irresponsible INC is not what educated classes wanted at all.
4. The INC planned and went ahead alone in UP and got a windfall out of that it seems.
5. Manmohan Singh as a PM candidate has gone down well with educated classes, if educated classes had to choose between Advani who hasn't made one coherent policy pronouncement in the Parliament vs Manmohan who made sure the Nuclear deal went through then the choice is clear.
Personally I am worried for the future of Wind power and Solar Power in India though.
6. The best news is that Trinamool Congress Mahajot in West Bengal has been able to dent the Left citadel like never before. They have been cut to size they deserve.

Voting is your right please don't be discouraged by petty bureaucrats trying to tell you rules that don't exist

It is observed that public servants responsible for accepting Form - 6 for inclusion of voters into electoral rolls are:-

1. Demanding address proof photocopy duly attested by class I officer with proof of address being atleast 6 months prior.

As far as I could see there is no such requirement mentioned by Election Commission of India anywhere on their website.

2. Denying submission of Form 6 because they already carried out the revision of rolls.

You can and should register right upto 10 days prior to last date of filing nominations for candidates.

According to Election Commission of India Voter Guidelines

<Quote>
2. Who can vote?
All citizens of India who are 18 years of age as on 1st January of the year for which the electoral roll is prepared are entitled to be registered as a voter in the constituency where he or she ordinarily resides. Only persons who are of unsound mind and have been declared so by a competent court or disqualified due to ‘Corrupt Practices’ or offences relating to elections are not entitled to be registered in the electoral rolls.
</Quote>

It is sad that the 6 month stay rule myth is being propagated not only by the bureaucracy responsible to register the voters but also by a currently popular website sponsored by some corporate. There is no mention anywhere of any rule which says that you need to have stayed at one place for atleast 6 months on the Election Commission of India website.

There is no last date for registering yourself to vote
<Quote>
4.5 As per the law, your name can be registered upto the last date of filing nominations by candidates that has been notified by the Election Commission for any general election or bye-election to an Assembly or Parliament. To enable the Electoral Registration Officer to take action on your application, you must apply at least ten days before the last date of making nominations as he has to mandatorily invite objections by giving a seven clear days notice before including your name in the roll. If you apply later than ten clear days before the last date for nominations your name may not be included for the purposes of that particular election.
<Quote>

Complaints
File a complaint to the Election Commission of India officers normally mentioned on state election commission's website in the following escalation order.

<Quote>
14.1 If you have any grievance in regard to electoral roll, Electors Photo
Identity Card or any other election related matter you may approach following
Officers:-
Chief Electoral Officer---------------- At the State Level
District Election Officer---------------At the District Level
Returning Officer-----------------------At the Constituency Level
Assistant Returning Officer-----------At Taluka/Tahsil Level
Electoral Registration Officer---------- At the Constituency Level
Presiding Officer-----------------------At Polling Station
Zonal Officer ------------------------For a group of Poling stations
</Quote>
The last two are about grievances at the time of polling.

What can you and I do

1. Insist that the officer must accept your Form 6 with or without address and identity proof. It is only for their convenience that you attach a photocopy of your identity proof and proof of residence it is upto them to verify or deny your claim.
2. If you have doubts about honesty of the officer. Take a digital photograph of the officer to whom you submitted the form 6 for inclusion in electoral rolls. Ask for and get the receipt of your Form 6 submission duly signed and stamped.
3. Check the online publication of voter lists until your voter registration is visible.
<Quote>
As an elector you should immediately check whether your name has been included in the electoral roll of the constituency where you reside or not. You can find out this information from the Electoral Registration Officer of your area. Electoral rolls in all major cities have now been displayed on official websites also.
</Quote>
4. If nothing works, complain loudly on your blog, call up everyone from the list below at the phone numbers mentioned at the website of state election commission.

Chief Electoral Officer---------------- At the State Level
District Election Officer---------------At the District Level
Returning Officer-----------------------At the Constituency Level
Assistant Returning Officer-----------At Taluka/Tahsil Level
Electoral Registration Officer---------- At the Constituency Level

Do not hesitate to pay them a visit if they refuse to attend to you on phone. File a grievance, send out e-mails to the media/blogger contacts, tell them you have as much right to choose a representative government by voting as others in the country.

5. Most importantly spread the word, nobody is asking you to go door to door in blistering heat or travel half the city to attend a candle light vigil just talk to the people you know, over phone, e-mail or in person.

1. Ideology:-
Free Market and laissez faire. Rule of law. The public resources should be committed for better regulation, and better public goods viz. security, courts, Roads/Highways, municipal water supply, electricity and foster free and fair competition in sectors like Education, Telecom and Healthcare without undue burden of regulation and bureaucratic interference and incompetence. The rights of consumers are best protected by a justice system that is not clogged. Let class action style suits take care of consumer interests.
2. Engagement:-
It doesn't matter which party the elected representative belongs to. Most politicians in India have no ideology anyway. Educated classes through resident welfare associations and other civil society fronts should engage regularly with the elected representatives. Most elected representatives except a few incompetent ones are happy to engage and try and push things to the advantage of their constituents. Monthly reminders( phone/SMS/e-mail) on what the elected representatives needs to deliver on can go a long way.
3. Collective voting:-
Choose the best man for the job without worrying about the party(as long as a party's agenda doesn't oppose liberalization we are good), if the previous elected representative was happy to engage and executed well then give her another chance if not seek change. But it is important to vote and as a collective block.
4. Communicate on the cloud:-
SMSGupShup.com is not just for college kids. Use the nearby park to meet once a month on a Sunday. Its easy enough to send an SMS one mobile per family to schedule or call meetings or administrative dues to resident welfare associations.
E-mail groups on Yahoo! or Google for those who would prefer to get an e-mail instead of an SMS. Lets put our elected on notice either they can learn to answer our e-mails and SMS'es or they can go to the dustbin of history. Yes we see political parties spending money on Google ads for one way communication through their websites, its not enough.
5. The urban tilt:-
India is rapidly urbanizing and at 25% of the peoples of India belonging to the educated classes it is time to exercise our rightful influence for good on the governance and politics. The days of rotten boroughs our medieval villages full of grasping paternalistic communities with un-healthy concentration of power amongst the 'dabang' caste groups is over.
6. Its our money, we need to throw some more time behind it to see it goes farther:-
We as taxpayers have a right to know and direct how this money is being spent. The educated classes when they spend their money, even very small amounts wants value for money from private businesses but is there any reason why we shouldn't account for value of money for every naya paisa paid as taxes(which by the way happens to be as high as 50% of our income in direct and indirect taxes). I am sure if a retired educated class person were to calculate taxes paid till date factoring in inflation the figures for each family runs into atleast a crore of rupees.
7. The logjam:-
The governance structure is oriented not towards fair distribution of public goods but adhoc distribution to those who can shout the loudest. The times of having dharnas and satyagrahas is over. The logjam of parallel structures in government each with the capability to block execution of projects funded by public money is a mess that the elected representatives need to fix. If they can fix it great otherwise let us put them on notice. They need to fire the bureaucrats who can't execute projects of importance. I believe there are relevant supreme court judgements that point out that government employees can be fired for in-competence without redress.

R K Misra's online initiative ChangeIndia.in. Runs on Joomla and uses Fireboard a forum module for Joomla. The site is hosted at Y! India and E-mail at Google. Changeindia.in doesn't have clean URLs its kind of hard to have custom paths defined in Joomla. No candidates announced for Karnataka elections. RK is a great believer in Private Public Partnership's potential to change India amongst other things he advocates.

lok-paritran.org uses Drupal as the CMS for its site and uses Drupal's in-built forums and looks like they have Gallery integrated into their drupal installation. Though they have clean urls they are not taking full advantage of Drupal's ability to define custom URLs and the clean URLs don't extend all the way to the Forums. Its not clear to me what exactly is Lok-Paritran's agenda, lots of high sounding philosophy and no practical agenda un-like RK's PPP mantra. And shudder they use a M$ Word document to announce their Bangalore candidate list.

Funny how many of us think that Joomla is a pretty CMS but drupal is a workhorse with lots of features and a clean codebase. It would be interesting to draw conclusions about politics of people who use Joomla, Drupal or raw PHP :-)

Jaago.in is built using PHP and shudder these guys are appealing in a very demagogic fashion to the middle class's insecurities and sound downright populist with Rs. 2/KWh electricity provisioning they are promising. There is no candidate list they have announced for Bangalore yet. Their frontpage boasts of a typical GOI like site welcome screen with a enter into link and a flash object.

Wahjava says: so in next elections, no need of polls, just check out the CMS of their site, and compare it on some CMS ranking site, one whose CMS has higher rank should be declared winner :P