{"id":19,"date":"2004-04-27T18:09:58","date_gmt":"2004-04-27T23:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=19"},"modified":"2004-04-27T18:09:58","modified_gmt":"2004-04-27T23:09:58","slug":"strategic-non-voting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200404\/strategic-non-voting\/","title":{"rendered":"Strategic non-voting."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Swami asks what &#8220;strategic&#8221; use non-voting could be put to.<\/p>\n<p>Why, that&#8217;s simple. Suppose that you are a hardcore BJP supporter. I mean, so hardcore that building a Ram Temple at Ayodhya is the only issue you are concerned with and is your life&#8217;s mission. Suppose further that the BJP (not just NDA) has  a comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha and cannot give the compulsions of coalition politics as an excuse anymore.  And yet the BJP isn&#8217;t bothering to build a temple in Ayodhya, because it has other things to do, like building a shining India and making money for its own ministers.<\/p>\n<p>So what do you do? You can&#8217;t vote for the Congress because the Congress isn&#8217;t going to build a temple for you either. You can&#8217;t vote for an even more extreme right-wing party, because either it doesn&#8217;t exist or because it has no serious chance of capturing power at the Centre. Your only choice is to stay at home and hope that the BJP gets a message that it can&#8217;t take you for granted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Swami asks what &#8220;strategic&#8221; use non-voting could be put to. Why, that&#8217;s simple. Suppose that you are a hardcore BJP supporter. I mean, so hardcore that building a Ram Temple at Ayodhya is the only issue you are concerned with and is your life&#8217;s mission. Suppose further that the BJP (not just NDA) has a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}