One of the problems is one does not know what a particular candidate stands for. I think if the aim is to create a political party, it’s important to make it easy for people to track what promises a candidate makes and what they fulfil, what statements about current affairs have they made, what news articles have been written about them and so on.
So I am proposing a simple site where you can search for your constituency or ward and see the candidates that are contesting. There you can see what each of the candidate has said and done.
I have been meaning to build this for my hometown of Pune using the domain pune.io which I have been using for sites like tekdi.pune.io
To given an example - for the 2024 Loksabha elections - the URL would be pune.io/loksabha/2023 and that would show a list of all the candidates on a single page to easily navigate and compare.
Ideally all information about a candidate should be available online. Politics in India sadly is driven by larger than life leaders and most candidates are banking on the charisma of these leaders. One of the things we should do, if we go down the path, is to ensure there is no projection of individuals, but of proposals and policies.
For us to be a political movement to participate in this elections, maybe we can endorse certain candidates (just thinking loud) who are transparent. Maybe we can create a list of candidates who believe in democracy - and are transparent about what proposals they are going to bring to the parliament?
Politics in India sadly is driven by larger than life leaders and most candidates are banking on the charisma of these leaders.
Exactly what I wish to challenge with a site like this!
For us to be a political movement to participate in this elections, maybe we can endorse certain candidates (just thinking loud) who are transparent.
I think this could eventually be the aim - asking candidates to transparently say what they stand for.
But for the current cycle of elections, I think we might have to narrow the scope down to what the candidate has done and said that is public knowledge. This might include youtube clips, news articles, tweets, facebook posts and so on.
To give an example - MLA from Pune has said that a project that has been languishing is bound to be completed by August '24 - https://x.com/SidShirole/status/1745076657566679271?s=20
So a system where we can track what a MLA like this one has said and how much of it has came out to be accurate based on his public statements seems easily attainable for this cycle of elections.
I believe that the first step we should take is to help people unlearn the notion of worshiping and idolizing leaders. This is crucial because policies and proposals are often overshadowed by a single speech that can stir emotions deeply. Unfortunately, this is a reflection of how our society currently operates.
Here in Bangalore, we have quite a few organizations which already do this, albeit not up to the level that we have everything that a candidate has ever said at a single place.
One of the organization which I follow is BPAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee).
A quick search and I happened to find another site called https://myneta.info
I wonder if it may make sense to improve these sites itself instead of creating another platform.
I do see that Democracy Collective may turn out to be an organization more along the lines of a BPAC than a political party capable of direct implementation of change. An indirect but very powerful influencer of change from the bottom up.
I agree - contributing to existing efforts is almost always better than starting something from scratch.
But the problem is that sites like these are built behind closed doors by think tanks and traditional institutions. I think we need something along the lines of how Community Notes on Twitter/X work. A very simple implementation is just having the site generate itself from yaml/markdown files on a git repo somewhere.
It’s critical that the tools for transparency in politics are transparent themselves.
An indirect but very powerful influencer of change from the bottom up.