In this election, pressing button meant for (NOTA) is as good as wasting your vote; this will not work. Even if you feel that no candidate is worth your vote, please understand that there are many others who would vote for them and one of them is bound to win.
Look at it from the perspective of these candidates. They would absolutely not care if you vote for NOTA as long as you are not voting for their opponents. As a matter of fact they will smirk at you by calling you irrelevant to the system.
It would have been a different picture had there been an option to say that a particular candidate is not wanted. It would act as a ‘negative marking’ system in an exam. To explain it let me put it this way…. If a particular candidate gets 100 votes in his favor and gets 40 votes against him, then the total votes to his account would be 60.
In this situation candidates would be scared of the voters. It would make them more sensitive towards public in general.
Anyways that’s a different topic for discussion.
Pressing NOTA would be equivalent to an invalid vote in the olden days on account of not properly putting a stamp against any one candidate. This doesn’t help the cause of rejecting candidates.
Few people rejecting the candidates will not stop one such ‘not wanted’ candidate to win. Let us accept this fact that one such candidate will occupy the chair of power; and then decide what we should do.
It is often said that a Government can work responsibly only if there is a strong opposition party.
Today it is widely accepted that Narendra Modi led Government will win this Loksabha election. Hence effectively you are wasting your vote if you give it to any other candidate.
So if you are likely to waste your vote this way, then let us think in a different way….
There is not going to be any party with major numbers to sit in the opposition and act as a watch dog in the parliament. The in-fights amongst rest of the parties will not allow them to unite in order to put up a strong opposition. Besides most of the leaders of these so called opposition parties have grey track records that is often used by the parties at the centre to silence them.
What is needed is an option that has clean record and honest intentions.
This brings us to a party that is new but inexperience to fight and win against the existing set of cunning leaders. Yes that is ‘Aam Aadmi Party’.
Recently we have seen how the chatoor leaders from BJP and Congress trapped AAP in Delhi and finally managed to eliminated it.
There can be a lot of points of debate in favor and against this party but one thing that no one will challenge is the honesty of the leaders of AAP.
Both the main frame parties of India i.e. BJP and Congress were shocked to see the vote share captured by AAP in Delhi. Immediately both of them ran into action to marginalize AAP and how cleverly they managed it!!
Let us not debate on this particular issue but a point that I am trying to drive is that the major parties of India are worried of the emergence of AAP. It would not be possible for these parties to buy out AAP leaders and suppress all the possible scams and corruption scandals of the past and future.
All of us know that like any other non BJP party, AAP cannot win this Loksabha election. Hence one may say that giving vote to AAP is like wasting your vote; just like I claimed in case of voting for NOTA.
But here the difference between voting for NOTA and AAP is that a signal will be given to the rest of the parties that AAP’s vote share is increasing. If they continue with their corruption recklessly, a day will come when AAP will get a majority of Indian vote share.
This will prove to be a deterrent for them. This is the message we should send out to them.
In fact I would go a step further and say that even if one wants Modi to become the prime minister, he should give his vote to AAP. The logic is that in any case Modi and his candidates are going to form the Government. What possibly will happen is their margin of win will be reduced but the inflated vote share of AAP is what will keep Modi and his Government on their toes.
PS: This is not any attempt to campaign for AAP party.
