During my conversation a few days back with one of the contestants for
the forthcoming election for Zilla Parishad when he begged with me to vote for
him and also pleading with me to impress upon the people to vote for him only, I asked him,
why should I vote for you when you are not my candidate because you are
selected without my consent and also without the consent of the larger number
of the voters from our Constituency, ironically and regretfully you are
selected by a coterie of those few who got some ulterior motive behind
selecting you, in fact this coterie selected you because they want to loot the
innocent locals by keeping their guns on your shoulder.
This coterie has dumped the contestant on our shoulders in the name of their
High Command which is as per my information is a fictitious body and existing
only on paper. I will not vote for the candidate who is imposed on us by a few having ulterior motive. When I further asked him what have you done
for the people in the past for their cause so that out of gratitude at least,
they will vote for you, he had no answer. Hence, I will not vote for a
candidate whose contribution for the public cause is Zero. Such candidates when
elected they turn into Maharajas and Hitlers without any obligations towards
the woes of the common people.
Then I asked, why you think people should vote for you, what qualities
you possess to attract the people towards you?
He replied saying, once elected I
will do my best to settle all your issues. For this I retorted, when this
toothless body ZP is devoid of any
concrete and practicable powers to do anything, how can you say you will do
everything after you got elected?
ZP election is a big tamasha and for
the contestants as status symbol and once they get elected the degree of this
status increases. Some will spend money
after this election while the others make their presence felt but the
MLA’s will veto all the resolutions brought for devolving the powers of ZP back to
the ZP.
On the paper the ZP are given lot of powers but they are not
implementable till the MLA’s and government remained adamant to devolve these
powers practically to the ZP, till then ZP
will remain as a big joke.
In my Constituency there are many
contestants vying for the victory, they have one object to defeat the powerful
one belonging to the powerful party. But how they can achieve their goal
individually? Impossible, in this way
they will all lose and for that matter they will all lose miserably giving
victory on Silver platter to the already powerful party candidate. They all should have come under one banner
and fought the election one against the other. But no, instead they like blind
volunteered to go on their own individually. Those who act as managers for
their parties should have thought over it in the beginning itself. Those who tried to destroy the structure of
my village should be kept out and their candidate should be defeated otherwise they
will further degoanise Candolim especially my locality. Candoicars must not
forgive such persons.
A.Veronica Fernandes.
