Elections should not be the only measure of a governments performance or a method for voters to give feedback
I recently started watching Ajeet Bharti and Anand Ranganathan.
I was listening to this podcast, and they raised a point that I genuinely found worth thinking about.
Right now, the only decisive and unified way for the public to give feedback to the government seems to be through elections. And if election results are the only real marker, then the BJP has every reason to believe that it is broadly on the right track and doesn't need to change much.
So how does the common public actually raise its voice? How do you tell the leadership, clearly and collectively, that they are getting something wrong?
One could argue that CJP was such a movement, but it eventually got sidetracked, lost direction, and is now mostly mocked. In short, it failed to become a unified public voice.
Any movement led by the opposition faces a similar problem. There is a general distrust of the opposition, and frankly, they simply don't have the backing of the majority. The Lokpal movement was supposed to create some form of public accountability too, but look at where that ended up.
Using elections as a feedback mechanism is also a dangerous gamble. You vote the wrong people into power just to "send a message", and things can go dark very quickly. The pre-2014 era still gives me PTSD. I genuinely don't want this country going back to those times.
But that leaves us with a serious question:
How do ordinary people tell a government they otherwise broadly support that it is wrong on certain issues-without gambling the country's future in an election just to make their dissatisfaction known?
How do we create a credible, unified public voice that neither becomes an opposition front nor gets hijacked and turned into a joke?
Video for context: https://youtu.be/Ei1pRGcbl4c?si=XufPTLrg2RX1ZbCI, around 36:55.