With the elections to Assembly and Lok Sabha over in both Telangana and Seemandhra regions and a whopping Rs. 8,000 crore said to have been spent by major political parties to ‘purchase’ power, Lok Satta Party says it’s time to break the dangerous vicious cycle and protect democracy.
Addressing a media conference here on Thursday, party national president Jayaprakash Narayan said as part of election campaign in Telangana and Seemandhra, all the parties made irresponsible promises by ignoring their primary responsibility of providing quality education, health care and basic infrastructure facilities in a democracy. Instead they focused on distribution of inducements from cash, liquor to saris and other gifts.
Regretting that democracy has been made synonymous with corruption, illiteracy, unemployment, Dr. Narayan said democracy meant more than the right to vote. It meant ensuring quality education, health, equal opportunities to all and economic growth. “By ignoring basic tenets of democracy, political parties had been doing great injustice to people,” he said.
Now that the elections were over, Lok Satta Party appealed to all parties in the country to work for replacement of the present first-past-the-post electoral system by proportional representation to protect democracy from collapsing. Under the present dispensation, the competent could not get elected and those elected with money and liquor could not deliver, he said.
Dr. Narayan also advocated direct election of the State Chief Minister as a corollary reform. The political parties in Telangana announced loan waiver and other temporary sops but failed to give a comprehensive plan on how they proposed to provide basic amenities in Hyderabad with Rs.13,000 crore annual income, employment generation and tackle power crisis.
The case of Seemandhra is even worse with an estimated deficit of Rs.12,000 crore. It may slip into even deeper crisis. Politics is not for deciding who would become Chief Minister or Prime Minister but to determine the future of society. If basic changes were not brought in with urgency, youth would face bleak future as 1.5 crore youth are looking for jobs every year, he said.
