Whitefield is rising to make a difference in 2018 Karnataka polls

BENGALURU: Karnataka goes to polls next year and the city's software hub, Whitefield, has already started preparations for it. For all the civic activism Whitefield has become famous for, it is also notorious for voter apathy . That many residents -about a lakh, according to an estimate -are not on the electoral rolls is one part of the problem the `Million Voter Rising' campaign wants to address.

The campaign itself was the result of the city civic corporation depriving citizens of voting rights. Last month, citizen group Whitefield Rising approached Karnataka's Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Anil Kumar Jha, who has ordered special camps to correct the anomaly in the Mahadevapura constituency.

“Right before the 2015 municipal election, our effort to get voters registered failed miserably,“ Whitefield Rising member Anjali Saini said. “We distributed about 10,000 enrolment forms and we got acknowledgements for 256. Only two citizens made it to the final list and the rest 254 forms vanished.

“Many booth-level officers in the civic body are either not aware of their duty or show no interest, Saini pointed out. Murugaraj Swaminathan, a project manager with a multinational firm, got himself enrolled on his fourth attempt, ten years after moving into Whitefield. “More the voters, the greater people's influence on political parties. We can get parties to field the right candidates,“ he said.

Here are some numbers. In the 2013 assembly polls, the voter turnout in Mahadevapura was 61% and BJP's Aravind Limbavali won by a margin of 6,149 votes. The margin was narrower in the Hagadur ward, where Congress' Uday Kumar won by a little over 70 votes. In the 2015 BBMP election, the voter turnout in all eight wards of Mahadevapura was 50.89%. That registered voters are not exercising their right will be Whitefield Rising's next focus.

“I'm sure the villages of Whitefield show up to vote. A corporator will not care for what we have to say because heshe knows we won't vote anyway ,“ Saini said. “In the next election, we want to be able to influence the candidates to make a real difference.“

Citizens have urged authorities to ensure that voter registration is smoothened. “Whitefield citizens have pointed out difficulties in facilitation of voter registration, and I have personally communicated the concerns to the BBMP commissioner and the Bengaluru Urban deputy commissioner,“ CEO Jha said.