The hullabaloo of elections finally got over at least in Bangalore. But the drama did not end with a bang. It actually just fell down with out even a sound. The polling turn out was too less to boast about. All the campaigning for voting without fail seems to have failed.

 To just understand why it was so I asked a few friends who did not vote. One of them said, “I do not believe in the system. So I did not vote.” I would call it simply an excuse to escape from walking up to the polling booth and voting. For this particular person used the election holiday to fix an appointment with the dentist. Well, as selfish we are, our tooth holds more importance than the nation.

Another friend had another excuse. “The politicians do not seem to want us to vote. There is no noise about elections. No one came to my house and asked me for my vote,” she said. When I pointed out that it was our duty to vote, she replied, “If they do not ask for votes, how do I know who are contesting the elections. Even newspapers did not have much about elections.” For this, I could just say you will find election news if you read the right supplement in the newspapers.

Another person said that there was no election debate in India like it was in the US. “Here, they only fight about ethnicity and caste. All who contest are corrupt. So I did not vote.”

All this is the educated and young middle class. But their knowledge of the democracy is such that one of them believed that he could send his vote by post and claimed that he even did it! Some do not even know what a constituency is.

On my rounds to polling booths, I saw that the politicians’ attitude was different to this educated lot. In areas where people were educated there was less luring of votes with the use or money or liquor. The pooling booths did not have people waiting outside asking you to vote for the parties. Well, I have to think again, of the politicians were sacred of them or they knew that this lot did not care about the governance of the country and hence their votes do not matter. In which ever areas the polling was clean, there were no people.