VIKALP – our idea of the perfect political alternative
It is irony of the nation that the word politics has been abused so much that common man has lost hope and every political party is treated at par with extreme disdain.
Nation needs a political alternative which can provide an alternative system making it accountable to common man. We are not here to canvas and campaign like any political party but to make you realize the sense of urgency we need to show. Nation is undergoing severe crisis. If we still continue to remain politically illiterate and remain indifferent that day is not far when entire nation would have been sold by these political parties and common man will have to run away to find a safe comfortable place for his family on this earth but will eventually fail to do so. What differentiates us from the developed nation? We need a robust system accountable to common man, which cannot be tampered with. Before common man can assimilate a scam, new one appears. Till now common man was forced to choose between the three parties Congress or BJP or AAP, none of which could never rise above cheap politics in the name of religion and caste. Things will never change unless we make a conscious effort to ensure that we have a political alternative which can redefine the system. With efforts of Youths’, the “Rashtra Srijan Abhiyan” movement which started off from streets in the form of Anshan, dharnas, demonstration is now knocking the doors of parliament to knock off this rotten system as a political alternative. Yes, we are a political party with a difference and political ambition of doing a clean and young politics. We are here to shake the rudimentary way of politics of dividing people in the name of religion, caste.
VIKALP – A Genuine Change
The Future of the alternative politics – nothing can stop us 🙂
Let us look at the present scenerio in the Indian politics. In states, the BJP has become the only alternative to the Congress and the AGP. The electorate is so disillusioned by a non-performing state government and a paralysed UPA government at the Centre that they polarised around the BJP in the last Lok Sabha polls. Both the Congress and the AGP suffer from credibility crises. The kind of “alternate politics” that the “Vikalp Party” could have provided had not taken shape then. The image of VIKALP had in fact taken a severe beating after Kumar and his team demonstrated anarchic tendencies. Today the scene has changed. The VIKALP has given the electorate here a new hope that a different kind of politics is possible. A kind of politics where the money coming into the party’s coffers have a paper trail so that the source is not obscure and shady.
“Alternate politics” believes that social activism, Youth movements can transform into political movements.
We appeal to all of you to shed this a political tag and support this movement.
As voters we are faced with this dilemma times without number. Voters pressing the “None of the Above” (NOTA) button on the electronic voting machine (EVM) have gone up, but the Election Commission has not provided us a choice beyond that. It has not spelt out the alternatives for those who vote NOTA. We still follow the first-past-the-post system where the candidate securing the highest number of votes is declared elected. The NOTA button on the EVM therefore is hardly an alternative to the disillusioned voter. As a result, many people today don’t want to waste their time voting someone they don’t want to see as their representative.
Alternative politics, therefore, means changing the way we in India do politics. We have had heated debates on the issue of criminals being given party tickets to contest elections even from jail. This is possible because our justice system is fraught with delays and because a person is innocent until proven guilty. That the judiciary is painfully slow to decide cases relating to political criminals indicates clearly that this pillar of democracy requires a major shake-up. But unless the political system itself goes through some momentous metamorphosis, all other institutions created within the framework of our Constitution will wither away instead of becoming robust. One is still unable to understand how the likes of Yadav or Sahabuddin, a person known for his acts of commission in Bihar, continues to be elected. It would, in fact, be interesting to know why people would vote someone who serves prison time and can hardly visit his constituency. Why do people like Yadav or Sahabuddin wield such clout? This criminalisation of politics is what has turned the electorate cynical. And this is where alternate politics can bring change.
But we don’t have to look as far as Bihar to see the ascendancy of negative forces in politics. Today all political parties claim as their prime agenda, a corruption-free government, yet have in their fold businessmen who have looted the system to the hilt and built personal empires from the sweat and tears of the common man. People in large swathes of this country continue to languish in poverty. Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is known to have subverted the system to build his kingdom as a sugar baron. For decades money has been invested in irrigation projects in Maharashtra amounting to thousands of crores of rupees without the poor farmers benefiting from those. Naturally, we hear of farmers’ suicides from these depressed regions of Maharashtra but beyond the newspaper reports no salutary action is taken. Prior to coming to power at the Centre, the BJP promised clean and responsive governance to the voters. And people actually believed Modi and voted overwhelmingly for the BJP. But Modi the vote-winner is now talking differently after becoming Modi the Prime Minister. His sharing a platform with Pawar recently just shows us that mainstream politics will continually get itself into a tight corner where the actors have to make compromises at great cost to the electorate.