Fighting the fake promises

Politics, nowadays, is in sync with the phenomena of making fake promises, tempting the public and the ensuing public discontent in the aftermath of unfulfilled pledges. As a politician, the more you pledge, the more you fetch in the elections no matter how hollow your manifestos tu out to be in practice.
As a matter of fact, these phenomena are spread in time and space evenly – be it at the state level, the national level or the international level. Even unfortunate, that there’s no legislation or any way to check the political-promise-facade. Every election, we see the politicians making promises. When it comes to deliver, no one is seen around. Politicians turn unapproachable and the public gets disgruntled. What protects them in the future from the public wrath is the inherent essence of anti-incumbency factor of the elections. People, by nature, can’t retain the memory of betrayal by politicians that far. They tend to vote ‘the least betraying’ candidate or the party to power. This way, the less popular regimes and dynasties in the politics make a survival for decades.
As a political party, a unit has two preoccupations. One, to press for less on the government in the earlier years of election and drag the effective service delivery towards the point of time just before the next elections and two, to deliver promised stuff just before the election.
This ensures that the government is able to safeguard ITS economy at the expense of the public comfort and to produce the vote bank: the perfect twin aspirations of every successful political unit.
An SRO is put into place after the election of a political party/ parties to power. It violates the doctrine of ‘Equal pay for equal work’, lessens the pressure on the exchequer and discomforts thousands of educated youth. Well, what follows? The force called demographic dividend elsewhere is put to walls here. Just when the latter picks courage to vote out the defaulter party, the latter promises of ‘re-examining the SRO’. The youth is sooth! It thinks, “All is well that ends well” and the sense of vengeance that had gotten to flourish for the last two to three years gets a freaking death. And the poor politicians are spared for the show of sympathy.
Take next. A year or a half before the next elections an announcement is made – the phased regularisation of the daily-wagers. A huge vote bank of not less than 60000 families is shown the ‘ludoo’. May be all of them don’t know it but I do. It’s not going to happen sometime soon. To think out the mind of a potential beneficiary, “If the promising party comes to power in the upcoming frays, I’ll be the beneficiary”. The promise does ensure that thousands of such families will vote in favour of the party making a pledge.
What we generally see around us is that the R & B, NREGA and Finance commission plans tend to execute their plans far better and at a fickle pace during the last moments of any government. This isn’t natural though. This is planned to get away with that inherent Anti-incumbency of elections.
The manifestos come up with the promises of making the borders irrelevant. In reality, the borders are made more relevant. The gaps tend to widen. The bilateral tensions see the surge. The youth who are pledged respect and safety are greeted with pellets and bullets. The public which is promised of the withdrawal of AFSPA is frisked and slapped on a daily basis in the streets, off their duties and down in the markets. A street vendor who is promised of a license to conduct his feeble business with respect has to pay commissions to the corrupt officials to increase the number of his business days. The expelled pandits who are promised of reintegration and reabsorption in the Kashmir milieu are fed with continual despair. The youth who are promised transparency in the recruitments are made to see the children of powerful politicians hitting the list.
There are innumerable incidents to exemplify how fake the promises of our governments are. Having no expectations from the political parties of today, can we expect the rise of an alternative which can give us a legislation to fight this seemingly innocuous problem? Can we expect the new hope of electoral bonds do the wonder? What if the electoral bonds are made into a single huge unit of political funding which is under a third party and independent institution which can fund the political parties only based on their performance in the previous elections?
These are the speculations. However, once they are incorporated into the system, we’ll see how the governance will be transformed for better.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Higher Education department and can be reached at: [email protected])