The World Literature Blog

Ten Reasons why You should Vote for the Congress starting April 11th, to rule from the centre with its allies for a better future for India in the coming five years.

1. Congress knows the main problem in India is eliminating poverty and plans to address it.

2. The Congress encourages trilingualism of mother-tongue/ English/Hindi which is better for us globally than the one of Hindi/Sanskrit and truer to our diverse unity.

3. The Congress has young leaders in Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, and Sachin Pilot and others in the wings like Hardik Patel supporting them backed by experienced war horses like Manmohan Singh, Shashi Tharoor, Raghuram Rajan the economist, Scindia, and Sonia Gandhi, and new people like the Shatrughan Sinha family to counter the BJP who only has old war horses, whom people are now totally fed up with, like Modi, Shah, Jaitley.

4. The names I mentioned at the top rung show evidently that the Congress is multi-religious and multi-caste, still, though upper class, whereas the BJP is only one religion and upper caste based, and at the same time also upper class.

5. While corruption was the main charge against the Congress, it is now proved that BJP is as corrupt, the only difference being Congress allowed all to be corrupt, being weak, but BJP allows corruption only among its own ranks and lets others feel the heat. Both are wrong approaches, but one is not better than the other.

6. The Congress eschews violence, whereas the BJP and its satelllites like the RSS espouse and support it. The former trend is any day preferable.

7. The rupee has crumbled during the rule of the BJP showing that economically it could not deliver.

8. The Congress stands for unity in diversity but the BJP stands for uniformity at the cost of diversity and names as seditious, meaninglessly, those who speak against this kind of uniformity by calling a spade a spade, i.e.; as false unity.

9. All the issues raised by BJP like Pakistan, corruption, terror, infiltration of refugees,, Ram mandir, are all issues - except for corruption - that has no relevance to the ordinary, daily lives of most common people in India, whereas the ones being raised by Rahul like poverty alleviation, unemployment or underemployment, and women's reservation or help for farmers now have pressing relevance.

10. Democracy is based on plurality or at least having a binary system of party politics which makes it imperative that Congress be voted back this time so that democracy is upheld and not emotional appeals to only one third of Indians in the North alone, in the name of religion and hate, and division on such lines which only affect a few parts of North India and not the rest of India. To defeat BJP now, it is not enough to vote against them or to not vote but to vote for Congress presently as each vote counts and a vote for Congress is also a vote against BJP and a vote not wasted.

© Koshy AV

Dr Koshy AV is the author of six books and an established literary critic and theoretician of repute. He is presently teaching English literature in Saudi Arabia and is also an editor and compiler and anthologist in the fields of fiction and poetry wherein he has nine more books to his credit. He also works in the field of autism.