codema.in
Mon 14 Mar 2016 7:13AM

Assembly Elections

DU [deactivated account] Public Seen by 331

I would like to suggest that at least 1 or 2 of us become candidates in this 2016 Assembly Elections. I know we are not enough number to be a political party, but our intention will be to spread the pirate ideas. I feel that we can reach out to a few more like minded people through this effort.

Would like to know your thoughts in this matter.

AS

Anish Sheela
Disagree
Thu 17 Mar 2016 12:31PM

We didn't do anything to establish ourselves enough to contest. An election candidate won't do any good without any preparations.

A

Akshay
Disagree
Thu 17 Mar 2016 2:46PM

Contesting election knowing for sure we won't win means we are using this only as an awareness platform. Agree to what balasankar and vidyut say. Also, adding the point that making ourselves look ludicrous will affect our future chances of contesting

DU

[deactivated account] Mon 14 Mar 2016 11:52AM

I'm not sure about a political party as such.. Cuz I.Don't know the first thing about politics.. Just.the outline..But I do agree that it will help.spread the pirate idea.

Were you thinking of forming a political party in the name of Indian pirates or Pirate party of India?

And I will tell you this: it seems like the right time to form a party if at all we agree to.. The timing seems perfect.. The whole.differential pricing, FreeBasics and the net neutrality issue as a whole has stirred up a shit.storm the government government did not expect and in the process a LOT of people are now.aware of Digital rights, etc etc.. They could.relate to a party like ours..

PP

Pirate Praveen Mon 14 Mar 2016 12:59PM

@arjun we can contest as independent candidates without a political party right now. The main idea is to expose ourselves to more people. As for registering a political party, we need a minimum of 100 members and we'll think about it when we have at least 100 permanent members.

DU

[deactivated account] Mon 14 Mar 2016 1:53PM

@praveenarimbrathod k..
Where are you planning to contest from?

And how much Money would be required for an independent candidate?

PP

Pirate Praveen Mon 14 Mar 2016 2:56PM

@arjun first we need to find who are all agree to this idea and second who are all willing to spend time on it. Looks like you, me and @sruthi is there. If one more person joins us, we can do it. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_%28politics%29#India 10000 rupees is the deposit. We'll crowd fund it. If we have enough people willing to contest and raise enough money, we'll do it.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 15 Mar 2016 4:54AM

@hashsingularity can you share your reasoning for disagreement?

HS

Hash Singularity Tue 15 Mar 2016 5:24AM

I have the following concerns,
First of all, It's highly probable that it won't be able to win any seat. Even if it wins, How well can the Pirate party be able to address social issues which affects people from the lower strata of of the society (especially digitally illiterate). There is no inherent drive in the party ideology to address income inequality and other social evils. And election is a kind of zero sum game, "Evil" candidates gets upper hand if some bifurcation of votes happen in the vote share of an "Angel" candidate due to the presence of a pirate candidate.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 15 Mar 2016 5:43AM

@hashsingularity we are not aiming to win right now anyway. Winning needs a lot of hard work, which we have not put in yet. Except for AAP and TDP, every party started with losing or small victories.

We don't have a finished blueprint of the society we want to create, so its only natural we miss out many important things from our platform. But it is not correct to say we don't address income inequality and other social evils. That is the very first section of our "basic principles".

"Section 1: We understand individuals and families of all sections of the society and different geographic locations have a right to realize equal life chances regardless of identity. Economic inequity, caste or gender or sexuality based discrimination, and differential abilities prevent many from realizing the equity of opportunities."

http://pirates.org.in/constitution/#/3

This is the same kind of argument commonly used in the US to discourage independent candidates. If you accept this argument, there can never be a new party, we'll have to always chose better of the two evils. In case of Kerala, I don't think a Pirate candidate will help BJP win any seats.

DU

[deactivated account] Tue 15 Mar 2016 6:00AM

@hashsingularity In fact one of the main reasons why I put forward this suggestion is that we should be able to spread our ideas to non-techie crowd as well. Currently the ideas are spread only through online media to netizens. I feel that by contesting, we will be able to reach out to common crowd as well.

Load More