Is getting more people to vote the solution?

It seems that everybody thinks that the best way to get our country back on track is to make sure everybody votes. Celebreties are taking part in campaigns with a message that everybody should vote. bleedindia.com is spending huge amount of money in releasing “pappu raj” advertisements for motivating people to vote. Times of India’s Lead India campaign is also focused on motivating people to vote. I am sorry to say all this money is going down the drain. Let me explain.

Let us assume that all the people who are eligible to vote do vote. What will happen? They will vote for all the major parties. Let me take the example of some states to explain my point. In UP, 95% of the votes will be cast for 4 major parties – Congress, BJP, SP and BSP. In Delhi, majority of the votes will be shared by BJP and Congress and so on in each state. In each state, major national parties and major regional parties are involved in contesting elections. What will the result look like. Same as last time. The power will shift from one group to another. One thing will be different. The political parties will get a larger number of votes as more voters would have voted because of the various above mentioned campaigns.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think it is important that more and more people should vote but this is just one side of the political system. The other side is that there should be good candidates to vote for as well as there should be an awareness about all the candidates contesting the election for a particular seat. Without this, the system will work the way it is working.

I think there are good people contesting elections but people are not aware of them. For instance, as I have mentioned in my earlier blog, when I voted for the state elections last time I saw a list at the polling booth which had at least 10 names of contestants. I didn’t know their names. I don’t think 99% of the voting people knew their names. If we do not know them, how can we vote for them?

By the way this is the basic principle of marketing. You may have one of the best products but people will not buy if they don’t know that you exist. One of the primary reason for our lack of awareness about most of the candidates is that they do not have the financial capability and the organization that established political parties have.

Let me bring in another marketing concept of evoked set. None of the non-traditional politicians are in our evoked set, that is, when we think of voting, their names do not come to our because we are even not aware of their names. As we know from marketing 101, if a product is not even part of our evoked set, we will not buy the product. This is exactly what is happening in our political scenario.

Another point which I have already discussed in my earlier blogs is that with no credible competition, we will keep getting a government which are no different from what we have seen before. Its time we brought competition to wake up the current group of corrupt and power hungry politicians.

Varun Gandhi tries to bring Hindu votes to him by making hate speeches. BJP cannot annoy its major vote bank, the ardent Hindus so they support Varun Gandhi. Mayavati sees an opportunity to acquire Muslim votes and it throws NSA at Varun Gandhi and locks him up. Do you think anybody is talking about how to solve the country’s problems? I don’t think so.

So what should we do? We should spend money increasing the awareness of all the candidates contesting an election. I would like to suggest to Times of India, bleedindia.com, jagero.com and others that they should devote part of the resources in increasing the awareness of what I call the non-traditional politicians contesting the elections.

avinash narula