In midst of the global crisis, India is ramping up for the general election. From my observation, the country is more than ever involved into the process. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year might have been the final point to exclaim “no more” for considering that politics was the business of others.
The concerns of the upper and middle class so far were rather geared to keep away from politics and focus on personal progress. The economic climate with growth rates of 8 % provided a good excuse for that. In result, the rift between the available intellectual capital of the country and that of the actual political leadership (except a few in the central government) couldn’t gape wider.
With India having equally slipped into the recession – albeit with less exposure to the global tsunami – and the internal security being exposed as vulnerable, the many Indians with a good heart and a sharp brain are saying enough is enough. “We have to get involved and there is no more excuse for anybody to stay away from the ballot”, seems to be the common sentiment.
Moreover, plenty of grassroot-initiatives are forming to dissolve the impermeable membrane between us (=the people) and them (=the politicians). Instead, people are starting to re-claim democracy and considering it increasingly a true res publica (public affair). One fantastic example for that is an initiative of a few fellow members of my Bangalore chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. It’s called smartvote.in and is supposed to provide unbiased information about the Bangalore candidates for the elections in India.
It’s an absolutely state-of the art website, with an appealing design which supports its purpose perfectly. But even more so, it’s about the content. All the candidates for the three Bangalore-constituencies are portrayed: which party they belong to, what they stand for in terms of security, unemployment, moral policing etc. as well as their criminal records. (So much about the integrity of politics to date if it’s relevant to follow up on this attribute and more often than not, this field will not remain empty …)
Nothing better can happen to Indian politics than such bottom-up initiatives gaining momentum in an Obama-like Election 2.0-style. And, Smartvote.in is a perfect example which even transcends the website as a destination towards connected content with a Facebook-group, too which allows to continue the conversation.
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Very glad to see this post. You really have your hand on the pulse of this country. :)
The efforts of an organisation called ADR [http://www.adrindia.org/] and their National Election Watch campaign will not go unnoticed this election.
Look it up. Much to learn about our motherland!
hi Rene,
Its wonderful to see how all the work that the team here at smartvote has put into the site for the last few months is gathering momentum.
Since you are tracking it, wanted to point out to others who might come to this page. We are keeping the smartvote site open post elections. The idea being that citizens can track the interviews of the elected leaders and hold them to their views once they have taken seat.
We expect people to refer to out pages or video files from our youtube page and build their conversations online.
Feel free to contact us if you want to use any of our information.
thank you for the link share!
will follow your blog too.
best
Arvind Prabhakar
Director – FL!P Design Pvt Ltd.
http://www.flipdesign.in
member of http://www.smartvote.in
Hey Rene,
It’s nice to see your write-up about SmartVote.
I’m a ‘local’ , a Bangalorean who is rather ( read: very) fed up with the Complaining Citizen. If I ask them if they have ever filed an RTI, used resources as detailed by Janaagraha, used info put out by citizenmatters.in, the response is a resounding no.
Sometimes I think we love to jabber away in out living rooms rather than DO something about our many problems.
Rant over!
:)