By Ghasiram Panda
Political chat in public is back with the declaration of electoral result. Voters are of different opinion while analysing the factors that influenced the election outcome.
Pre-poll promises by the candidates and parties are one among the key. The parties and candidates had put in their full efforts to pull votes in their favour. That’s why there were no dearth of promises, commitments and assurances.
Parties issued manifestos and advertised them in different mediums including social media to attract people’s attention. Candidates also added to the list contextualising the local issues. Different organisations too pushed issues and challenges through the process of people’s manifesto.
Apparently, in any given situation in an election, emergence of demands and its acceptance by parties and candidates are common phenomena. When candidates get defeated or a party do not get a mandate then all these pre-poll promises lose their rationality.
On the other hand, the parties in power also very often lose seriousness on fulfilling the promises as laid down in their respective party manifestoes. Also we lack mechanism to fix accountability against the poll promises.
Reminding the parties through amplifying community voices is the only way. But this is becoming difficult in the post-election scenario as elected representatives seldom visit voters with the same vigour as during the election. In a cycle of five years, memories of people get faded and the spins of promises continue with slight twists and turns.
There have been legislations to make the government officials accountable. The Right to Information has empowered people to ask questions to these service providers. As in an electoral democracy, elected representatives leading governance system should also have similar accountability.
In this last election, to some extent this has happened. Videos of people asking questions in different meetings to candidates on their previous commitments have been viral. But these are not enough. People in power consider common people asking questions to them as offensive, hence try to suppress those thoughts and initiatives.
Manifestos are public documents on commitments of a political party. Responding peoples’ queries on the commitments made need to be mandatory. This will be helpful to reduce false promises.
Candidates and parties are obtaining our valued votes with a commitment to providing certain services. A consumer can approach the consumer dispute redressal forum if the services committed are not fulfilled against a purchase worth even Rs.10.
In any case, votes are more valued then any amount of money and we don’t have any forum to raise our grievances if the services are not fulfilled committed against our votes. The Election Commission of India should have a role in reviewing the manifestos of the parties in power and the commitments of the elected candidates. As there is no proper projection of the resources and strategies for implementation of the promises laid down in manifestos, many of them are not getting fulfilled or half done.
If there can be a mechanism to submit a progress report to the ECI as against the commitment will ensure more accountability. The ECI should also open mechanism for rest of the period to receive complaints and act upon in case the given commitments are not fulfilled.
The manifesto committees formed by the parties before poll should get converted to manifesto review committee with a purpose to advise the party and government to take necessary measures for fulfilling the commitments. Organisations took initiatives of peoples manifesto should also strategies themselves to follow these commitments persistently through initiating process like social audit.
Fulfillment of commitments floated during the election should be legal rights of the people. This will surely help in bringing electoral reforms and strengthen democracy.
