Some of you must have been surprised by the topic and might be wondering how can such a nice tradition of holding elections whenever the politicians of country concur be related to an evil thing like global warming and recession. Well, we will go into the correlation here and use enough sleep inducing facts to make you understand how much the Indian elections, the grand celebrations of the Indian democracy are contributing to the global warming and how can you do your small bit to save Planet Earth by sleeping soundly on the election day. We are running a campaign to that effect to make sure that the majority of Indians don’t fall for the bait and help the cause of their health as well as that of fellow residents of the planet by sleeping soundly on election day as opposed to some monsters who have taken up a resolve to keep the Indians awake and make them vote thereby taking the world economy and climate in a downward spiral.

Everybody is well aware of the fact that India is the largest democracy of the world and holding elections on such a large scale is such a cumbersome and energy guzzling exercise. Climate scientist James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, claimed the threat of extinction of plants and trees due to the large usage of paper in Indian elections and the leading deforestation in large parts of India was the reason why the Election commission switched to using Electronic Voting Machines for the elections. But as we shall soon see, the choice was obviously between the devil and the deep sea and the new monster the election commission has given birth to is bigger and better that the previous one and is capable of derailing the whole economy of world as well as any efforts to rein in global warming off track. There has been talks in hushed tones in the corridors of global powers about how impending Indian elections pushed the world economy over the brink and into the recession rather than going bust of the Lehman brothers. Nouriel Roubini who is credited with predicting this also point out the relation between the recession cycles of 4.5 years and Indian general election cycles of 5 years. Thomas Hudson has pointed out that the existence of a relation between rate of increase in global warming rate after Indian independence and the country choosing democracy as the way of governance. The recent spurt in global warming rate has been attributed to increasingly fragile parliaments and state legislatures Indian elections have been throwing up and governments not lasting full terms leading to more elections overall. Research is going on to determine how to de-couple world economy and Indian elections and also to reduce the impact of Indian elections on global climate. It has also been uncovered that many climate scientists are put under enormous pressure to distort or hide any scientific results which suggest that Indian elections are to blame for global warming. A survey of climate scientists which was reported to the UN House Oversight and Government Reform Committee noted that “Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the relation between words ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ and ‘indian elections’ or other similar terms from a variety of communications.”

An exercise involving 714 million people is going to be mammoth by any scale. The parliament has budgeted Rs 1120 crores for election expenses. The question I ask is couldn’t that money be used more appropriately for saving jobs for so many people who are losing their jobs right and left, myself included. And that is budgeted expense. We all know how the budgets overshoot in India and how unbudgeted expenses dwarf budgeted ones. 1,368,430 voting machines, 828,804 polling stations and umpteen number of police and para-military forces and well as election officers are mobilized on a war footing for this celebration of democracy. You can imagine the amount of money and energy wasted in this kind of exercise.

A survey cum study conducted by Boston Consulters on behalf of Green Peach Association has pointed that given the divided state of Indian politics and increasing elections as well as inclusion of election for local area governments, elections held in India would contribute on an average 0.73 degrees Celsius each year to global warming. In an accompanying survey carried out among renowned climate activists and scientists across the globe, an overwhelming 82 percentage of 737 responders held Indian democracy responsible for the increased instances of global glacier meltdown, reduction in polar ice caps and increase in sea level. Studies carried out on behalf of UN by Save Coastal Lands group has pointed out that this extravagant celebrations of Indian democracy would lead to submerging of a couple of island countries and would render 1.4 billion people homeless by 2047.

Coming to the economic implications of these elections, Indian BOP (Balance of Payments) data collected over last 50 years shows a spike in outward flight of capital in huge amounts every time general elections are held in India. In March 2005, Tax Justine Network reported $1.5 trillion of national wealth siphoned out of India at time of general election in preceding year. Conservative estimates put the total amount of this wealth to a modest, $7 trillion, am amount which all experts agree can bring world economy out of doldrums and can get the global growth engine running again. Raymond Baker in his widely celebrated book, Democracy’s Achilles Heel: General Elections and Capital Flight discusses how general elections in democracies the world over has led to siphoning of money into global financial Black Holes.

Keeping in mind this facts, we once again appeal you to join our campaign in huge numbers and make sure that we don’t do more damage to an already worsening situation. Lets sleep for a better tomorrow. Very soon I will come up with alternatives that we as Indians should endorse to contribute to reduce global warming and stabilize world economy so that our actions do not lead to destruction of our planet as a whole or obliteration of human species from the face of planet earth.