Must I vote at all?

"Isn’t 'majority mob' rule an inevitable outcome of democracy? The moment you buy into the idea of democracy you are effectively agreeing to that inevitable outcome," a Maldivian friend opined this week.

He was reacting to my another Maldivian friend's statement that he now is in a "**** democracy" mode and questioning why we should live within the confines and parameters dictated by other people, specifically, the "majority mob" who gets to make all the rules in a democracy despite this political governance system being the only evil that actually works, according to another Maldivian friend.

I had this debate started when I disclosed that this week a woman called me saying she represented some organization but I couldn't catch which one and asked her why she was calling and she said they just wanted to ask the question "Raajje ge musthagubalaa medhu dhekenee kihineh tho?" ("What do you think about the future of Maldives?") and I told her "Thi kamaa alhugandu ge eh ves shauguverikameh neiy" ("I am not interested in that at all") and she hung up the phone.

She spoke Dhivehi though there's the possibility she was a Maldivian hired by a foreign organization. I think because the presidential election is near, all these kind of things will be happening. Heck, I don't even clearly understand the geopolitical interest in Maldives by China and India because the information the public gets will be extremely filtered to the extent that those in power with vested interests would unsurprisingly twist reality according to their whims. So I didn't want to get involved in political surveys like that, especially because the presidential election is just around the corner on 9 September.

And then there is that dodgy issue raised by a Maldivian friend about what right the telecommunications companies in Maldives have to share our mobile phone numbers with third parties: it is irritating when we ordinary citizens are bombarded with phone calls and SMSs from various government authorities, not to mention all those nuisance calls we get from restaurants promoting their food.

Coming back to that call, as a Maldivian friend said, it was a vague question. The surveyors could have asked a more interesting question like: "How could AI (Artificial Intelligence) change Maldives?"

A Maldivian friend suggested that I should have answered that Maldives will be ruled by a Bangladeshi in the future. Or that Maldives' future will be crap. Or throw back the question to her and ask what she thinks about the future of Maldives.

Another Maldivian friend said that if I am ever again surveyed, I should ask the caller what makes her candidate deserve my vote. I told her that the caller then may launch into a lengthy rambling detailing her candidate's manifesto which would be a waste of my precious time.

Another Maldivian friend said that the caller could be just a clerk doing a job which only involves her doing nothing more than ask that question and might even be ignorant of Maldives' politics.

A Maldivian friend who supports the Opposition said he usually answered "I haven't thought about that yet" and the surveyor will immediately hang up. I used that technique too earlier and got the same convenient result as him.

I guess I should have not ended the survey so abruptly and instead tried to find out what it was about. But I didn't want to do that because in earlier surveys, at the end of the questioning, they would ask awkward questions like "Could you vote for ****?" It's none of their business to find out about my secret vote.

I should have pointed out that but I was so outraged they didn't respect that fact or are ignorant about it, I didn't even feel like saying anything more and just wanted to end the call and so I said "I haven't thought about that yet" and they hung up immediately.

A Maldivian friend said that he was surveyed by a presidential candidate's camp asking him if he was "happy" with that candidate and whether my friend would vote for that candidate. He said he replied in the affirmative to all the questions and that the surveyors seemed to be "happy" with those answers and hung up.

He told me: "Why create needless discord? You tell them something they'll be happy with, and they won't bother you and the whole thing ends nice and easy. It's like picking a fight with the waiter over bad food. It's not the waiter's fault and he already has a shit job."

A Parliament Member told me to choose my answer according to the bias of the camp which called me and answer that I will support that camp's candidate even if my choice was some other candidate. Convenient, I guess.

A member of an independent commission told me that while I was free to answer according to my wishes, not saying anything at all may help prevent me from lying.

Ever since 2008, when we Maldivians had a first taste of democracy, which President has done any substantial work to lift ordinary folks from poverty? Why do poor Maldivians still sell their votes for just MVR 500 (USD 32)?

A Maldivian friend told me that if anybody asks whether I am interested in the future of Maldives, I should say I am now like the protagonist in Albert Camus' "The Stranger" - completely detached from society. Or as a character from Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" who, quite unsuccessfully, tries to detach from the cruelty and injustice of life by not only taking life not seriously but rather even going to the extent of willfully making fun of everything as a deliberate and intentional act of aggression against the absurdity of everything.

My "**** democracy" friend has a friend who feels that the situation of Maldives is so dire, a change is necessary and that the presidential election on 9 September is the best chance of doing that. His facial expression when he said this was so innocent, I felt sad for this clueless youth who I thought was very naive due to being ill-informed, I supposed.

Maldives is such a messed up country now, perhaps even a failed state, trying to hide behind a facade of peaceful paradise where, otherwise, behind the scenes of "the sunny side of life", lurk the shadows of darkness such as rampant sexual abuse of children and domestic violence against women, human trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking and it's abuse, money laundering, and what not. No wonder that all aspects of our life are now intertwined with black markets and organized crime. And that may be only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

And as if our dirty politics is not murky enough, the Elections Commission (EC) has introduced a coercive, dangerous, and outrageous rule which doesn't let people have the choice of not being in a party if they had already registered for a party in earlier years - meaning, you cannot leave a party until you join another party. Is that democracy? So I have some friends who are stuck unwillingly in political parties to which they don't want to belong anymore.

As for the upcoming presidential election, so far there is no candidate I like. If that remains so by the time it is 9 September, I will not go to vote even if some people say we have to choose the "lesser evil" when all the choices available to us are all evil.

It might be a very dystopian attitude to base my very bleak outlook on the future of Maldives on the prevalence of “majority mob” rule and corruption, according to a Maldivian friend.

"Is that really a fair assessment?" he pointed out, adding that as for corruption, which he doesn't condone, that too is how it has always worked even in societies that superficially seem to be just and equitable.

"Political power, throughout history, has always been about resources - which political power player gets what share of the country’s resources. No?" he said.

True that! There's no such thing as free will in many aspects of our life, such as biological functions, and we will be forever trapped in society for our very survival. There's no total escape from it, democracy or not. Not even the Universe can be blamed for that because that's the state of Nature, whether a Higher Power arranged things that way or not.

I am already in this "**** democracy" mode. I have become quite introverted and reflective now though that still doesn't offer me all the freedom I want. But it's a good enough space where I can still decide on a lot of things such as reading a book instead of going to vote on election day.