It is the hour of the vandal!

There are many differences between a Presidential Election and any other kind of election but one of the more in-your-face differences is that presidential elections are essentially about two individuals (sorry Bahu, you didn’t even make a ripple) whereas other elections force the public to deal with thousands of faces. We are still a fair distance away from nomination day and already the writing is on the wall, I mean, the faces are on the walls.

These are not posters of ‘candidates’. They are people who expect to be nominated by their respective parties. They are not violating any election laws. They are just engaged in a time-honoured practice called ‘brand positioning’. They want us to remember their faces and names and to associate these with some recognizable tag-line so that they can form some kind of relationship between name and voter. It does not matter now if the association is negative. What matters is visibility and name recognition.

I find it all nauseating but these people don’t really care about people like me, this I know. They are motivated to vandalize city space because they are confident that in the end the people would most likely have to choose among equally incompetent, equally distasteful and equally destructive individuals. Sure, there’ll be one or two who could be described as half-way decent, half-way intelligent and half-way competent, but typically such people would not have the bucks to position themselves in a like manner. In other words, they would be too small to be caught in the voter’s radar.

Why do they spend so much money to get into Parliament? The last I heard, MPs get about Rs. 90,000 in terms of remuneration per month and this includes a fuel allowance and another allowance towards mobile phone bill. Let’s add it all up. That’s Rs. 6.4 million over a period of six years.

I checked the costs of running the kind of campaigns our poster-boys seem to have a preference for and I was astounded. I am told that someone had planned to spend around Rs 50 million in a campaign for the Western Provincial Council but ended up spending Rs 200 million because another candidate had pumped in more money. This same candidate has a budget of Rs 80 million for the General Election but is ready to spend several times this amount if pushed to do so by others who also have money throw.

It is a simple matter of arithmetic. It can’t be for the pay. Also, if it was about helping people, then clearly they can do more from outside Parliament than within if they have so much money to spend. It is not as though these individuals are endowed with Einstein-like brains that could be employed for the betterment of the nation by way of constitutional reform, development of 10-year plans, budget-management and crafting solid and sustainable foreign policy guidelines. They are, going by track record, good at one thing: making and busting money.

Does the lure of public office have something to do with greater degree of public visibility? Well, if visibility is what they want, they can do it anytime and at a fraction of the costs incurred in a grueling election campaign where they have to out-post other rich poster-boys, cut out others who also want to put up cut-outs and so on.

They could do the visibility project during the off-season. It would be cheaper. Say sometime in May 2010, when the election-match is done, the shouting, the jeering, the sour-grape story-telling etc is all done. The visibility-seeker could spend about Rs 20,000 every month and remain ‘visible’ for six years (total cost, Rs 1.44 million or 0.72 percent of what they would spend in the coming months). It has to be something else, folks. No prizes for guessing why. Opportunity to rob.

That’s it. They are spending so much money to lure us into electing them so that they can say thank you by robbing us. These are ladies and gentlemen, let us keep in mind, who are very good at doing simple mathematics.

They know to add and subtract. They know how to calculate difference between cost and benefit and they do this before they start throwing money left and right. There is no such thing as election campaigns. There is only ‘investment’: a commitment to spend a certain basket of resources with the expectation of securing reward later on in volumes greater than the amounts spent. Simple.

We have a system where we have to vote for party first and candidate later. I’ve already made up my mind. No, not about party or candidate. I have decided that I shall not vote for the ‘most visible’ or the ‘more visible’ because degree of visibility is directly related to the readiness to vandalize and the plan to rob.

Why vote for a vandal? Why vote for someone who plans to rob? I am going to keep my eyes glued on city space. I am going to get a general idea of who is most visible. I am not going to be swayed by neat and eloquent slogans because I have enough experience in advertising to know that tag-lines can be purchased and that words are used less to communicate than to mis-communicate and mislead.

Nice artwork, neat visuals and great lines are not going to sway me. Lack of visibility is what will catch my eye. I am going for decency. I am going for substance. I am going for a manifest aversion to vandalism.

I hope party leaders drop vandals from their lists, but if they do not, the fact that they have not will get factored into my decision on election day. And when it comes to marking my preference, I am sure I would have acquired the kind of blindness to ‘visibility’ that a responsible voter ought to have got after being exposed to two months of in-your-face vandalism.

And I am going to tell my friend too. I have a simple message: vote for the lesser seen, he/she is probably less of a crook.

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