DailyPost 2883
WHERE ARE OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES?
When have you last met your elected representative? If you ever have. When has he visited you last? Or visited your area or your professional group or addressed any issue of the community? The simple question is, have you been impacted in any way by your elected representatives? This is with regards to our day-to-day existence, what has their role been in a crisis of any kind, from a natural disaster to a heinous crime or a communal clash. Is making statements and staging dharnas for their ringmasters their job?
It seems the only relationship we have with them is when you press their button on the EVM. That is the beginning and the end of participative democracy. Has he ever come down to you to take an opinion of something he needs to know or would be for the benefit of your area. Can you tell us the name of one legislation at the state or the union level, where your elected representative has played a pivotal role. To bring it down to one single point, how accessible is he and what he has done for you as an elector. Does he deal only with his party cronies, who hang around him for benefits and he needs their support for all the ground level democratic drama machinations.
The variety and numbers can simply surprise you from the elected members of the village panchayats to the parliament of this nation. You have seen the fate of urban local self-government / governance in the country and also the clout of the corporators. They all enjoy the costly trappings of power paid out of taxpayer’s money. They can’t even get a streetlight fixed or a pothole filled up. They are never a part of our miseries and efforts to alleviate it. Whatever might be the party, to the best of my understanding they are legally mandated to perform the same task. Being people’s elected representatives what has been their role in the current national level agitation as a consequence of the rape and murder of a Kolkata medico.
If you go and ask them, most of them would be of the opinion that they have no role to play. From the corporators to the MPs how many have stood with the victims’ families. Do they have no role to play in individual / familial / institutional / professional distress of this critical nature. The nature of support required is all encompassing, when generally there is nothing forthcoming from the elected representatives. They are at best found on X platform or TV debates. They have nothing to do with the protesting doctors, they feel it’s their battle, the perception being based on their total inaction and near zero utterances but for the ones made to save their party / government. Have elected representatives lost the plot or they live only for their vested agenda?
ARE OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES ON A FUN RIDE AT OUR EXPENSE?
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.