Election in India Anyone of the Indian citizens after attaining the age of eighteen has been given with the right to elect representatives of the central parliament (Loksabha) and of the state legislative assembly (Bidhansabha) usually at an interval of every five years. Election Commission is there at the center and also in all the states to conduct the elections in time. This is very important for the people of India as through this process the honorable law-makers are elected for a scheduled time of five years and are allowed to make new laws or revise old laws and thus they are empowered to act as managers of this country.

If one follows such an election in India once one can easily realize what is its value to the state of India. One will watch the activities of the election commission from the declaration of the dates of the election to the conclusion of the total program, the involvement of thousands of government employees that include ministerial staff, home guards, polices of different states, personnel of the Border Security Forces, Central Reserve Police Forces and of the army, the expenditure to the tune of millions of rupees, engagement of lakh of four-wheelers and consumption of petrol and diesel of not less than of millions of liters and movement of the sound waves throughout the cities and suburbans and small towns and villages violating all norms of decibel limit -- a show that does not allow the state of India to sleep in peace for a second for months.

The feature of the show suggests two fronts. On one side stand the candidates from whom the people will elect their representatives and on the other side there are people themselves who will cast their costly votes to elect someone from among the candidates. The candidates are less in number and still however good in number and amazingly armed with varieties of characteristics. Someone is old and someone is new. One is utterly professional and one has arrived just from a different profession or wants to be equally successful in this profession too. One has enormous property and one's venture is for amassing property only. One appears to be interested more in the interest of America or Britain than that of India and other one wants to annihilate all the minorities or will offer them at best a second class citizenship or even has a plan to destroy Pakistan and capture it. Again, there are candidates who love to be addressed as the Communists, that is, the messiahs of the working mass but work and even have been working in a few states always against the interest of the toiling people. There are, of course, thief and cheater and mafia and murderer and even some fortunate who have an always temporary life within the boundary of the jails. Still in the Parliament or in the state assembly a few teachers and educationists are also seen, as symbol of surprise, co-operating with their colleagues in the framing of the bills and laws. There are candidates belonging to an all India political party or to a regional party or even to a party that does not have a root anywhere in the soil of India.

The other side is also equally colorful. There are opulent people who have lands and houses and cars and credit cards and foreign tours and sometimes mills and factories and such others. They count 15% of the total population at best. Then there are upper middle class and middle class who are economically secured or whom at least we cannot include to the insecured at all. There one can find poets and playwrights and painters and singers and actors and filmmakers and traders and agents. The rest include however-employed and half-employed and unemployed workers and workers of the unorganized sector with very low wages and with utter uncertainty always looming large. They include retrenched workers, landless labors and hapless village-folks driven out from their traditional soil and professions and also from their cultural heritage by the state for the building up of big dams or for the construction of plants or for the promotion of the real estate projects in the name of industrialization or development of the people.

People are generally interested in their right to elect the representatives and they like to remain satisfied with the good and bad of their leaders and with the system that exists. On the other extreme, there are people disappointed on the basis of the past experiences. And when a good number of polling booths have been captured or jammed or names of genuine voters could not be traced in the voters' list and even one is informed that his vote has been cast by somebody else whom no one knows and when number of persons killed and number of houses burnt because of the inter-party clashes have been announced and an environment of nightmare is understood to be prevailing allowing free hands to the hooligans, the election commission declares that it is happy for the more-or-less peaceful election this time. This time printed and electronic media are observed to be very much active and innovative and are observed to be devoted to focus the deeds and misdeeds of the honorable representatives and a large section of the people irrespective of their status and standard find very much interest in the real politics and they are found to be paying attention to the television and newspapers. Then for a few days the different political parties will engage in accusing one another to end the mutual mud-throwing operations. Then people will listen to different proposals on the reformation in the election process but love to remain non-involved in the matter of getting conscious of their own rights, that is, of their democratic right.