While we Thais are fighting about what to do and what not to do on the political front, the beacon of democracy in the region, India, has managed to show us a way forward.
In recent state elections held in five states including the capital New Delhi, the voters basically showed the door to the once-powerful Congress (I) party that is the core of the ruling United Progressive Alliance.
The Congress, India’s oldest party and one run by the Gandhi dynasty, is shivering from the outcome, knowing that a nationwide general election in on the cards by May next year.
Anti-Congress feeling was so strong that the party was nearly wiped out by the nearly 116 million voters, with the biggest defeat coming in the capital where the Congress chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, lost her own seat to anti-corruption crusader Arvind Kejriwal.
In postmortems by the Congress and the ruling coalition on what went wrong, strategists surely must be wondering whether the same results will be mirrored in the general elections in 2014.
Well, how surprising can it be that voters are fed up with a government that has been at the centre of various corruption scandals, from the mind-blowing $210 billion in revenue losses to state coffers from the “coalgate” scam, to the $40-billion 2G spectrum licensing mess? These, along with other smaller scandals, have left the almighty Congress humbled and weakened.
The relatively unknown Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party led by Mr Kejriwal managed to shake the Congress to its roots because of his anti-corruption crusade. Interviews with voters indicated that they chose Aam Aadmi because they were fed up with the way the Congress was doing business.
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