Lok Satta, which entered electoral politics after being a political movement for two decades, has decided to go back to being a movement yet again.
“Lok Satta Party will not take part in electoral politics for sometime. We entered active politics with an agenda to speed up the pace of change in politics for inclusive development and make it people-centric. That purpose is not served as we do not have 10 to 20 per cent of vote share to give us the traction to change the nature of politics,” said Lok Satta Party founder-president Jayprakash Narayan.
Interestingly, when Loksatta movement decided to emerge as a political party in 2006, there were several associated with the movement who did not approve the decision then.
Reminded about it, Dr.Narayan said it was a logical and rational decision then. “We genuinely felt there was need to create a platform for new politics and to bring youth, middle classes and other marginalised sections into the mainstream”. Several sections of people who used to abhor politics started engaging with the politics after Lok Satta Party was formed. But LSP was still a second choice for people, not the first to expedite the pace of change, he said. “This made us to rethink our strategy and renew our movement as time is running out. We were not in politics for posts but to facilitate change and strengthen democracy,” he said. Announcing the Lok Satta Party’s decision to take a break from electoral politics in a media conference here on Tuesday, Dr. Narayan said Lok Satta as a movement since 1996 had notched up several victories in the field of political and judicial reforms. Be it Right to Information Act, Local Courts Law, Lokpal legislation, National Health Mission, Disclosure of criminal antecedents of candidates, Improvement of voter registration and several others.
“We thought once right legislations and institutions are in place things would improve, but they didn’t. Now Loksatta wants to strike out strongly and let thousands of people voice their aspirations,” he said. Creeping centralisation had been doing enormous harm to democratic institutions. States had no flexibility to implement their well meaning agenda though they have resources, power and were accountable to people. Thus Loksatta 2.0 version would focus on strengthening and restructuring federalism, ensuring quality universal health care and education to all and accountability to tax payers at local level, he explained.
Party to build people’s movements for health care, power decentralisation
