Big-time film stars, industry barons and top political leaders fall under this microscopically small section of the society. The rich and the upwardly mobile generally seek to skip the ordeal of standing in the queue with the common man before a polling booth, sometimes for an hour or more, in the hot sun to cast their precious votes. Assembly and parliamentary elections are rarely held in the winter or in the monsoon. South Mumbai’s Malabar Hill, Cumbala Hill, Altamount Road and Napean Sea Road region, which has the biggest concentration of the country’s super rich, has historically the lowest polling record.

The poor and the working class representing both the below (BPL) and above the poverty lines (APL) with monthly income less than Rs. 10,000 each represent nearly 70 per cent of the country’s population. Ironically, the average polling in most constituencies in the country rarely exceeded 70 per cent. Slum-dwellers, industrial workers, sweepers, government and semi-government employees, farm laborers, cycle-rickshaw pullers, auto-rickshaw drivers, petty businessman, traders, artisans, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, office clerks and accountants, students, teachers and media persons are among those most excited about participating in a franchise and casting their votes. It is from their elected representatives, governments are formed in states or at the Centre. Candidates and their respective political parties spend maximum time and money to woo this band of voters before election. Door-to-door campaign by candidates is the order of the day. Independent candidates, without the support of any regional or main-stream political party, stand little chance to win assembly or parliamentary elections, these days. Although, the same may not be always true about strong ‘dissident’ candidates fighting election independently.

Once the elections are over and the winners and their allies, in the absence of a clear mandate for a single party, form the ministry and the government. Thereafter, the people’s representatives in the government become off the limit of the people, especially of the poor and the common man. For this category, meeting a minister in his office chamber or at his official residence rarely provides a pleasant experience. Not many elected representatives, who become ministers and run government, care to revisit their electorates before the next election is due. Instead, the corridors of power are thrown open to the hubris, the big business and their agents, big-time fixers and top government suppliers who rarely cast votes. The hubris and their agents often have hands in the formation of coalition governments, selection of ministers and even allocation of ministries to their ‘preferred’ candidates. And, it would appear that the primary objective of the government, thus formed, is to serve the hubris first. In the process, the government is seen more as anti-people or least sensitive to the concerns of the common man it pretends to serve.

It seems the real beneficiary of the so-called popular democracy and the universal adult franchise in India are the politicians, businessmen and their agents, money managers, bureaucrats and the officialdom. The number of these classes of population, the wealth they possess or control and power they enjoy has vastly increased over the last sixty years of India’s popular democracy. Demographically speaking, the vast increase in the population of these groups of highly privileged people, who may be branded as the rich, controlling over 80 per cent of the country’s wealth, should have led to a sizeable reduction in the number of the poor. In reality, the reverse has taken place. The number of the poor and the common man had expanded several times in the last six decades, making the divide between the rich and the poor much wider and sharper than they were in the early 1950s, when the universal adult franchise first started. Since then, social injustice and inequity among the poor have become deeper.

If any single factor is responsible for the decline of the status of the poor and the increase in its number over the years, it is the apathy of our democratically elected representatives in the government towards education, healthcare, social infrastructure and living-wage for the underprivileged. The state-funded free primary schools for the poor and government-aided secondary education system are in total shambles in terms of quality and utility. Most government hospitals and health centres, visited largely by the underprivileged, are generally a one-way traffic for patients. Those who manage to return home ‘cured’ often come back with secondary infection because of an extremely unhealthy condition and poor housekeeping in these government hospitals and health centres. The least spoken about the social infrastructure and the level of sanitation and potable filter water connection in the areas dwelled by the underprivileged is the best. Incapable of or even unwilling to improve the quality of life of the underprivileged by efficiently managing the state-funded schools, health centres and social infrastructure, which would have certainly narrowed down the rich-poor divide, the elected governments by the poor are out to ominously privatise these services to the further misery of these social underdogs.

The sky-rocketing food prices, high cost of dwelling, vastly increased cost of medicines and doctors, education and transportation, growing inflation, rising unemployment, lack of job opportunity at lower levels and extremely poor wage structure at the bottom are making the poor poorer by day. The government’s pro-capitalist policies such as privatization, foreign direct investment (FDI) in high-yielding businesses, etc. are designed to create more entrepreneurs than decent employment opportunity for the needy ones. The government is following the age-old top-down economic policies. The government thinks more entrepreneurs mean more jobs. More jobs mean more income, higher demand and better living. Unfortunately, the real picture is different. The nature of enterprise matters more than the number of entrepreneurs to ordinary job seekers. More entrepreneurs putting up air-conditioned shopping malls, multi-brand retail outlets and entertainment centres, or entrepreneurs such as distributors of branded products mostly create extremely low-paid jobs as those of security personnel, sales boys and girls, bookkeepers, call-centre operatives, loaders and un-loaders. Such entrepreneurship is more exploitative of the society than of any real value to the underprivileged.

Thus, it would appear that the government by the poor is not only off the poor, but also against the poor. The government subsidy, which was originally designed for the benefit of the poor, had in fact helped the business community more through whom subsidy was disbursed to keep the prices of food, fuel, fertilizer and low-cost housing lower and affordable. What those poor and the underprivileged actually got was only a trickle. Now that the government has been made to understand by its outdated laissez-faire oriented economists that the subsidy is a drain on the exchequer, the whole administration is on a pricing freedom mode, from petro-products, cooking gas, fertilizer and life-saving drugs to electricity and drinking water. This, along with rampant export of food articles and legalizing commodity futures and options trade, is fiercely adding to inflation. It seems our politicians and political parties, the left included, have taken the electorates for granted. There is hardly any real concern to improve the lot of those who religiously come to vote in every election to create governments in states and at the centre. The system may be considered safe as long as poverty, lack of education and fear of repression keep weakening the morale of this large section of the civil society. Till then, the oligarchy of the rich will continue to dominate the government at the cost of poor democrats. (IPA Service)