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Dear Sir:
It is heartening to note that you are likely to accept the inspired suggestion of our Supreme Court to include:
as the last candidate on every EVM (Electronic Voting Machine).
It is a good move.
As everyone knows, the polling percentage in our country is miserably bleak. The main reason is that the average voter is unhappy with all the candidates of her constituency (some of them in jail); and in fact has turned cynical about the whole exercise of voting.
The suggestion to include NOTA will drag all the voters to their booths, just as Bengalis are dragged to hilsa and Tamilians to dosa.
But there has so far been no suggestion as to the symbol for NOTA.
As you know, most of our compulsive voters are our illiterate village women (dehati aurat) and that is the reason we have symbols at all on our voting machines.
I brooded over it for a long while and felt that the Thumbs Down (TD), the most widely used symbol for Dislike, is the most appropriate for NOTA:
However, most of our dehati aurat may confuse it with the familiar symbol for tarpan (tilodak) which stands for 'giving up for dead ancestors'...and we don't want them to give up on our democracy which is not quite dead, yet.
So we need a symbol they can easily recognize.
I thought the symbol below (of a grinning donkey) would be the most relevant:
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Dear Sir:
It is heartening to note that you are likely to accept the inspired suggestion of our Supreme Court to include:
None of The Above (NOTA)
as the last candidate on every EVM (Electronic Voting Machine).
It is a good move.
As everyone knows, the polling percentage in our country is miserably bleak. The main reason is that the average voter is unhappy with all the candidates of her constituency (some of them in jail); and in fact has turned cynical about the whole exercise of voting.
The suggestion to include NOTA will drag all the voters to their booths, just as Bengalis are dragged to hilsa and Tamilians to dosa.
But there has so far been no suggestion as to the symbol for NOTA.
As you know, most of our compulsive voters are our illiterate village women (dehati aurat) and that is the reason we have symbols at all on our voting machines.
I brooded over it for a long while and felt that the Thumbs Down (TD), the most widely used symbol for Dislike, is the most appropriate for NOTA:
However, most of our dehati aurat may confuse it with the familiar symbol for tarpan (tilodak) which stands for 'giving up for dead ancestors'...and we don't want them to give up on our democracy which is not quite dead, yet.
So we need a symbol they can easily recognize.
I thought the symbol below (of a grinning donkey) would be the most relevant:
And, if NOTA wins in a constituency, provision should be made to declare him elected and send him to our Lok Sabha, with a seat in the front row, garlanded...and a suitable oath administered.
You may think this an offensive suggestion, but recall that the Super-Democracy in the world (now shut down though) has an Elephant and a Donkey as symbols for their two major political rivals.
And we already have an Elephant...
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