5 Things to Know and Debate Before You Vote

By Hindol Sengupta

With terrifying standards in everything from personal hygiene to financial probity, Indian democracy is gravely imperilled. But is that the debate you hear? Is that what resonates across campaign speeches? Assailed by the question of who are we to vote for, we are forgetting the other vital question-what are we to vote for?

This book is a shout-out, a call to action to talk about the things that matter-or should matter  to most of us as citizens-from how much time the Lok Sabha wastes during sessions to how much MPs are worth and how many of them hold criminal records. Are our MPs 'too far away'? After all, if a democracy has to work, the agenda needs to be set by voters as much as by political parties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper XXI
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351367079

Hindol Sengupta

Hindol Sengupta is the author of definitive books on the Indian luxury industry. He is the founding trustee of Whypoll Trust, India's only open government trust. He is senior editor at the Indian edition of Fortune magazine.

Book preview

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5 THINGS TO KNOW AND

DEBATE BEFORE YOU VOTE

HINDOL SENGUPTA

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Table of Contents

1. Citizen, Unrest

2. What They See From the Hill

3. Whose Time Has Come

4. When in Doubt

5. Return on Investment

About the Author

Copyright

1. Citizen, Unrest

This, around us, is a strange disquiet. Have you felt it? For more than a year, or was it two, the breathless air has smelt of something about to happen, and on the streets, on blinking screens, the velocity of all that we have wanted to say for so long a time, and now, all at once, it is coming out, stammering, stuttering, in a tripping babble.

It is not the past we crave, it is not nostalgia, which is so often an affectation of the elite, but we are those who mourn the future that never quite arrived, and for a while now, has seemed irretrievably delayed.

There is an election coming, its approach complete with the slowness of a storm. But we in India, so proud and petulant about our democracy, are used to elections here and there in our multicoloured ways every season. What, then, is different?

Sometimes in the varied histories of old, old countries, there comes that time when the gossip in the capital begins to smell