Confessions of a South Mumbai voter
Priya Ramani -
Thursday, April 30, 2009 6:56 PM
It's quite clear now that voter turnout in South Mumbai will be even less than it was in 2004.
Surely after 26/11 these people could have got their act together, you must be wondering. These bloody South Mumbai types. All prime-time talk and no action, right?
Before I continue, I have a confession to make (god I feel like I'm in at an AA meeting): Hi I'm Priya, a resident of South Mumbai and I didn't vote.
So am I the classic couldn't-care-less South Mumbai voter then?
In 2004 I voted Milind Deora. He won. The time before I voted Congress too.
In 2009, I was set to vote for Deora. My parents did. They made a day of it. They woke up early, went for a morning walk, voted (there were only four other voters at the booth) and had breakfast out. My father loves Sonia Gandhi. He would bear any inconvenience for her.
"South Mumbai turnout is only 11% so far. Go out and vote people," a friend pleaded earlier today on Facebook. The final voter turnout is around 43%, and that's some percentage points lower than last year.
Yet, I didn't vote. Why?
These days I live in Delhi. In the span of two months I needed to make three trips to Bombay--my dad's 70th birthday, a good friend's wedding, and a vote for Milind Deora. For reasons irrelevant here, I could only travel twice. I thought really long about which of these events was most important to me. I knew my father would consider it a 70th birthday gift if I voted instead of just hung out with him on his birthday.
Besides, poor Milind Deora campaigned so hard, harder than he ever has. He was regularly at Marine Drive talking to voters (he met my parents too). Surely he deserved my support?
But I couldn't shake off the image of Vilasrao Deshmukh, the Congress chief minister, taking Bollywood director Ramgopal Varma for a tour of the Oberoi, after the hotel was gutted by terrorists last November.
Then again, I believe the BJP and Shiv Sena are parochial, conservative, anti-women, scum parties. And there's no way I'm going to vote for a party that lists building a mandir in its election manifesto.
As I was thinking about these things, Manmohan Singh and LK Advani continued to bicker about irrelevant issues. Say something about the girl child, I wanted to tell them. Say something about the security personnel who died in the Naxalite attacks during election month, I thought. Instead, we had a national debate on gudiya vs budhiya.
That's when I decided the Congress would have to do without me.
It's easy to travel on Delhi's broad roads and live in its Lutyens bungalows and vote. Before asking why Mumbai hasn't voted ask what political parties have done for the city. If you lived in dirty, grimy, overcrowded, overworked Mumbai and you had to pick between voting and taking your family on a well-deserved summer vacation, you might pick the latter too.