Anti-reservationists: How to vote

1. First and foremost and most-obvious: Please get your name listed in electoral rolls. Even if it means taking two days leave and roaming around in sun around government departments, do it. Then vote as written below.
2. If some candidate in your constituency declares that she/he will push for ZERO percent reservation, vote for her/him.
3. If nobody is against reservation, vote the standing candidate out. Best way of doing this is to vote for the closest competitor. Do not be bothered by party to which the competitor belongs to. Just vote the closest competitor, even if the closest competitor is arjun-singh :-).

Key message is that vote for throwing existing candidate out from your constituency.

That's it. This is the gist of this blog-post. You may stop here. BUT, if you are interested to know my rationale for the above algorithm, read on.

All the political parties believe that indian middle class does not vote. Hence we have the scenario where spontaneous protest is being systematically ignored by all political parties. Commies make fun of the entire episode by saying that these are stage-managed. Protests of much lesser dimension bring government to heels because parties see a vote bank in those cases. Thus the only way available to us is to create a hulchul in most feasible manner.
Youth For Equality and all its sister concerns may not be able to field electoral candidates, at least not in all the seats. If candidates can be fielded with agenda of 0% reservation, voting choice is clear.

If not, we have to hit the person who voted-for/quietly-agreed to this 27% extra reservation. That person should be made to feel the fear of the thing which (s)he prizes most - the parliament seat. Hence voting against him/her is necessary. But voting against somebody means voting for somebody. Abstaining from voting will also reduce the margin, but voting against the candidate will be 2X impact. So who do we vote for? An independent candidate who does not belong to any party? This is less effective as this may lead to a lesser margin. The maximum impact can be made by voting the closest competitor.

Let us take example. North Bangalore voted for H.T.Sangliana(BJP). C.K.Jaffer Sharief(congress) lost last time. As per the above scheme, we should vote for C.K.Jaffer Sharief. Now we know that CKJ has no love for general-class candidates, but that is not the point. It is Sangliana we are trying to punish because he agreed to 27% extension. If we can make CKJ win, he will know that it is the swing of general-class vote which made him win. So even if we general classes are a minority, an enbloc voting for closest competitor may tip the result. And both CKJ and Sangliana (in above case) will be acutely aware of what caused the result. This is what we want. Making our impact feel.

The specific example of CKJ/Sangliana highlights another issue. This is a time to put all other issues including communal-issues in backburner. You may justly feel afraid of islamic-appeasement or christian-appeasement. We will revive these issues later. Now is the time to prevent this pseudo disenfranchisement of general category. I believe what is happening to general class is not dissimilar to what happened to jews during nazi regime. If we lose political voice, the opponent will next come at us to take everything away. 'All general category people should leave out one room of their house for backward class people'. Sounds ludicrous? Far fetched? Not really, when people can shamelessly give the pseudo-logic of "how 1000 year of oppression can never be offset by 50 years of reservation". You are seeing for yourself that parliamentarians will crush logic if it suits the vote-bank. So nothing is impossible here. Sample some. 'All general category people will immediately forfeit 10% of their bank deposits for upliftment of society'. 'All general category people will pay 5% extra cess on income-tax'. You see all these can be 'justified' if somebody wants to.

BJP.. boy oh boy. I voted for them. But what a disappointment. I can not blame BJP really. Actually we middle-class/general-category (just wondering, are these two terms interchangeable) betrayed BJP so BJP is taking the only option available to it. I do not blame them. But nor will I vote for Sangliana in next election.

Left parties. These guys are one happy lot. I believe communists love it when people stand powerless in front of government with folded hands, begging for telephone-lines, gas-connections, OBC-certificates and what not. They had this status quo till 1992 and will give anything to bring it back.

Congress. This is at the same time a hopeless case and only hope. You see, this party does not have any democracy. If one fine day madam feels reservation is bad, the whole party will put their head in 'sonia ji ke charanoN mNe'. But we can not rely on this party as we do not know which way cookie (sorry madam) will crumble. If madam had asked me to lick her feet, I would have done so if that meant abolishing reservation. But that prized mind of madam is not for me to fathom.

Before I end, we all (I mean general category) should thank Arjun Singh. This is NOT a sarcastic statement. Remember, if he had not raised the ruckus, 27% reservation would have been silently passed through.