Actually I still want to write that post about the foreign origins issue even though it is moot now, but it will turn out to be a long one and I won’t have the time for it for some time. So I want you people to do the hard work for me.<\/p>\n
Defenders of Sonia Gandhi’s becoming PM point to the fact that she is a citizen and hence she is entitled to the post, period. Yazad asks me if I am having second thoughts about the rule of law, which is one of the principles I hold dear. <\/p>\n
Actually no. But a law is supposed to have a rationale behind it. So my question is, why have the citizenship requirement at all?<\/b>
\n
\nI am not being facetious. I am asking Sonia defenders to come up with a serious answer to the question of why we insist that only citizens can stand for elections in India. For example, if we voters think that Margaret Thatcher is the right person to run India for a short period, shouldn’t we be able to elect her? Or, take a citizen of another country who is a long-term resident in India. Take a citizen of Nepal who is in India as an expatriate manager. Let’s assume that he has a (Nepali) wife who is really interested in the affairs of the city where they are currently staying. Shouldn’t she at least have the right to stand for municipal elections there? <\/p>\n
I know that I am stretching the examples here, but that is not the point. The point is: the law is constraining the rights of the citizens to elect whom they want.<\/b> My question is, why<\/b>? Why shouldn’t we trust the judgment of the voters in this case? <\/p>\n
I am sure we let non-citizens live and work here, and that I think is right. Ultimately it is a question of the rights of Indian citizens to do business with whom they want, including with non-citizens<\/b>. Why do we make an exception for those who run our government? In fact, we also let one class of non-citizens to be our soldiers (Nepali Gorkhas). But even there the same question arises. Why don’t we hire whoever wishes to join our army, regardless of citizenship? <\/p>\n
Please pretend that this is a serious question. What I really want to do is find the reason<\/i> why we let only citizens stand for elections, and see where the reasoning takes me in Sonia’s case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Actually I still want to write that post about the foreign origins issue even though it is moot now, but it will turn out to be a long one and I won’t have the time for it for some time. So I want you people to do the hard work for me. Defenders of Sonia […]<\/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\/46"}],"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=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}