D. N. Bezboruah
Unfortunately for us, the world’s largest democracy is not a democracy at all. It merely pretends to be one. We have all the trappings of a democracy, but we end up with a system that remains more feudal than anything one can hope to find in a democratic set-up. This is largely because of what we have done to our elections in over 61 years of independence. We have made them undemocratic, we have underscored a dynastic preference and over the years, we have facilitated the entry of more and more criminals and unlawful elements into Parliament and the State legislatures. As a consequence, we now have a system of governance that is anything but democratic. And the worst part of it all is that many of our elected representatives are people who have no faith in democracy. They want to be rulers by hook or by crook and most of our elected representatives think they are prime ministerial material. So, many of them have ambitions of becoming prime ministers without having any attributes in them at all that can qualify them to be prime ministers. Many of them think that if the inexperienced Rajiv Gandhi could become Prime Minister after the assassination of Indira Gandhi or if someone as immature and inexperienced as Rahul Gandhi can now be projected as the future Prime Minister of India, why not them? The irony of it all is (a) that more and more political leaders of different hues in India are starting dynasties on the lines of the prime dynasty of the country, and (b) that politicians not belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi family can nurse ambitions of becoming prime minister even despite their lack of courage to oppose the dynastic obsessions of that family and the political party they belong to. But let us begin at the beginning - with how undemocratic our electoral system can get.
The prime aberration of the Indian electoral system is that it is a first-past-the-post system that is not regarded as democratic in any advanced democracy. Here, any candidate who secures the highest number of votes wins an election. So, if a candidate can manage to prevent all voters except those who are sure to vote for him from coming to the polling booths, he can ensure his own victory even if he gets only about 5,000 votes in a constituency of three or four lakh. Anyone who regards this as an exaggeration should look at the track record of elections in Bihar where many people in rural areas were not able to vote for 30 or 40 years until T.N.Seshan tightened up things as Chief Election Commissioner. One must also remember the extreme example of the late Biswa Narayan Shastri who had won a Lok Sabha election on just one vote in 1983 when the people of Asom had boycotted the elections. For five years he remained an MP pretending to represent his parliamentary constituency when he was actually no more than his own representative. Many European countries that have a far better system of ensuring the mandate of the people, regard the kind of elections that we have here as downright farcical. In France, for example, they have two rounds of elections. Suppose there are eight candidates in a particular constituency. The first round of election eliminates six of the candidates to leave just the two candidates with the highest number of votes. The second round of election would have just the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the first round. In the second round it would not be enough just to have the higher number of votes in order to win. The winner must also secure at least 40 per cent of the votes of the electorate. The former Soviet Union had a similar system as well, though it was possible to predict the winner beforehand because of the totalitarian form of government.
Apart from this first-past-the-post aberration, there has been great leniency over the years on the part of the Election Commission in preventing criminals, people with criminal records and lawbreakers from contesting elections. Given the general inclination of our lawmakers to remain outside the ambit of the law, the lawbreaker and the criminal has been attracted to the legislature not because of a desire to serve the country, but rather because being a legislator gives a person a modicum of immunity from the due process of the law in India. And who wants this as desperately as the lawbreakers and criminals. No wonder we had over a 140 members in the last Lok Sabha who either had serious criminal cases against them, had been convicted by the courts for heinous crimes or had been proved guilty of other serious breaches of the law in financial dealings. And they were our elected lawmakers! In the entire history of independent India, there would be hardly two or three cases of ministers and other important politicians in the corridors of power actually sentenced in serious crimes and punished. Sukh Ram is perhaps an exception that came in handy just before the Lok Sabha elections. A nation that is so strongly wedded to rituals must regard such happenstances as a godsend of sorts at election time.
For the best part of two decades now we have seen the failure of any major political party to form a government on its own at the Centre. The last two decades have been an era of coalition governments. This is nothing to be amazed at. This is the sort of thing that keeps happening all over the world. So there is not much to be worried about pre-election coalition arrangements that are based primarily on ideology. However, political ideology is passé in India. Any politician in India who talks about political ideology these days is considered to be naïve. Coalitions are forged on the unabashed principle of political opportunism. As a result, one sees more and more of strange bedfellows. However, these days post-poll alliances seem to be the order of the day, with the attendant horse-trading that brings in a lot of hard cash to the willing collaborators. It also leads to the induced break up of coalition governments. In the Northeast, the States of Meghalaya and Manipur are particularly vulnerable to horse-trading after coalition governments are formed. Toppling governments barely months after they are sworn in is a favourite pastime with many opportunist politicians who are unable to get ministerial berths at the first go. And there is no dearth of obliging governors to invoke Article 356 at the drop of a hat to facilitate such toppling games. Quite clearly, no one is thinking of what all this does to the State or its people as long as ambitious and opportunist politicians are happy.
In the past, particularly in the 14th Lok Sabha, we have seen some of the most bizarre and unimaginable post-election coalition arrangements of convenience among political parties that have been traditional rivals at the State level. The 14th Lok Sabha saw the Congress joining hands with Left parties that had been always been political rivals. The Congress also took in coalition partners like Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. It suddenly ceased to matter to the Congress that there were serious criminal charges against both Lalu Yadav and Shibu Soren. Both got important portfolios in the Union Council of Ministers. The Left parties were reluctant to join the ministry, and so Somnath Chatterji of the CPI(M) was made the Speaker of the Lok Sabha. And everyone saw what the Left parties that could never hope to seize power in the country could do when they became piggyback rulers. We saw how they were able to call the shots and then suddenly ditch the coalition when they chose to. We saw how the Congress had to take the support of even the Samajwadi Party to win the subsequent vote of confidence. We also saw how the RJD was quick to announce the breaking up of ties with the Congress as soon as the 14th Lok Sabha came to an end.
There can be no doubt that we are heading for a hung Parliament that will doubtless be worse than the previous Lok Sabha. The Congress attempt to foist Rahul Gandhi as Prime Minister is going to make the task of cobbling up a coalition even more difficult. Even if the Left parties were to support the Congress in a critical situation in order to save ‘secularism’, they would be far less willing to go along as part of a coalition with the Congress with Rahul Gandhi as PM. So there is the likelihood of even worse horse-trading at the end of the present Lok Sabha elections than there was last time or during the recent trial of strength of the UPA government. As it is, the country is spending 88 per cent more money this time than it did for the 14th Lok Sabha elections. This time money is being paid out directly to voters. This explains why an illiterate and arrogant Congressman like Manikumar Subba who has even now given two places of birth - one in his nomination paper and another to the media - is still a hot favourite with the Congress. The fact that his own community in his Lok Sabha constituency has disowned him and pledged not to vote for him seems to be of no consequence with his party because the moneybags that can buy Bangladeshi votes for himself and others are with him. That is what we have managed to turn democracy into - a polity in which no upright and efficient citizen who is a patriot can ever find a place because he cannot obviously have the kind of resources far beyond his known sources of income that are needed to buy votes. Politicians alone seem to be able to make that kind of money in five years flat. Even Rahul Gandhi’s declared personal wealth this time is about ten times what it was in 2004. This is the model of democracy that the world’s largest democracy practises today. THE SENTINEL
Unfortunately for us, the world’s largest democracy is not a democracy at all. It merely pretends to be one. We have all the trappings of a democracy, but we end up with a system that remains more feudal than anything one can hope to find in a democratic set-up. This is largely because of what we have done to our elections in over 61 years of independence. We have made them undemocratic, we have underscored a dynastic preference and over the years, we have facilitated the entry of more and more criminals and unlawful elements into Parliament and the State legislatures. As a consequence, we now have a system of governance that is anything but democratic. And the worst part of it all is that many of our elected representatives are people who have no faith in democracy. They want to be rulers by hook or by crook and most of our elected representatives think they are prime ministerial material. So, many of them have ambitions of becoming prime ministers without having any attributes in them at all that can qualify them to be prime ministers. Many of them think that if the inexperienced Rajiv Gandhi could become Prime Minister after the assassination of Indira Gandhi or if someone as immature and inexperienced as Rahul Gandhi can now be projected as the future Prime Minister of India, why not them? The irony of it all is (a) that more and more political leaders of different hues in India are starting dynasties on the lines of the prime dynasty of the country, and (b) that politicians not belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi family can nurse ambitions of becoming prime minister even despite their lack of courage to oppose the dynastic obsessions of that family and the political party they belong to. But let us begin at the beginning - with how undemocratic our electoral system can get.
The prime aberration of the Indian electoral system is that it is a first-past-the-post system that is not regarded as democratic in any advanced democracy. Here, any candidate who secures the highest number of votes wins an election. So, if a candidate can manage to prevent all voters except those who are sure to vote for him from coming to the polling booths, he can ensure his own victory even if he gets only about 5,000 votes in a constituency of three or four lakh. Anyone who regards this as an exaggeration should look at the track record of elections in Bihar where many people in rural areas were not able to vote for 30 or 40 years until T.N.Seshan tightened up things as Chief Election Commissioner. One must also remember the extreme example of the late Biswa Narayan Shastri who had won a Lok Sabha election on just one vote in 1983 when the people of Asom had boycotted the elections. For five years he remained an MP pretending to represent his parliamentary constituency when he was actually no more than his own representative. Many European countries that have a far better system of ensuring the mandate of the people, regard the kind of elections that we have here as downright farcical. In France, for example, they have two rounds of elections. Suppose there are eight candidates in a particular constituency. The first round of election eliminates six of the candidates to leave just the two candidates with the highest number of votes. The second round of election would have just the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the first round. In the second round it would not be enough just to have the higher number of votes in order to win. The winner must also secure at least 40 per cent of the votes of the electorate. The former Soviet Union had a similar system as well, though it was possible to predict the winner beforehand because of the totalitarian form of government.
Apart from this first-past-the-post aberration, there has been great leniency over the years on the part of the Election Commission in preventing criminals, people with criminal records and lawbreakers from contesting elections. Given the general inclination of our lawmakers to remain outside the ambit of the law, the lawbreaker and the criminal has been attracted to the legislature not because of a desire to serve the country, but rather because being a legislator gives a person a modicum of immunity from the due process of the law in India. And who wants this as desperately as the lawbreakers and criminals. No wonder we had over a 140 members in the last Lok Sabha who either had serious criminal cases against them, had been convicted by the courts for heinous crimes or had been proved guilty of other serious breaches of the law in financial dealings. And they were our elected lawmakers! In the entire history of independent India, there would be hardly two or three cases of ministers and other important politicians in the corridors of power actually sentenced in serious crimes and punished. Sukh Ram is perhaps an exception that came in handy just before the Lok Sabha elections. A nation that is so strongly wedded to rituals must regard such happenstances as a godsend of sorts at election time.
For the best part of two decades now we have seen the failure of any major political party to form a government on its own at the Centre. The last two decades have been an era of coalition governments. This is nothing to be amazed at. This is the sort of thing that keeps happening all over the world. So there is not much to be worried about pre-election coalition arrangements that are based primarily on ideology. However, political ideology is passé in India. Any politician in India who talks about political ideology these days is considered to be naïve. Coalitions are forged on the unabashed principle of political opportunism. As a result, one sees more and more of strange bedfellows. However, these days post-poll alliances seem to be the order of the day, with the attendant horse-trading that brings in a lot of hard cash to the willing collaborators. It also leads to the induced break up of coalition governments. In the Northeast, the States of Meghalaya and Manipur are particularly vulnerable to horse-trading after coalition governments are formed. Toppling governments barely months after they are sworn in is a favourite pastime with many opportunist politicians who are unable to get ministerial berths at the first go. And there is no dearth of obliging governors to invoke Article 356 at the drop of a hat to facilitate such toppling games. Quite clearly, no one is thinking of what all this does to the State or its people as long as ambitious and opportunist politicians are happy.
In the past, particularly in the 14th Lok Sabha, we have seen some of the most bizarre and unimaginable post-election coalition arrangements of convenience among political parties that have been traditional rivals at the State level. The 14th Lok Sabha saw the Congress joining hands with Left parties that had been always been political rivals. The Congress also took in coalition partners like Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. It suddenly ceased to matter to the Congress that there were serious criminal charges against both Lalu Yadav and Shibu Soren. Both got important portfolios in the Union Council of Ministers. The Left parties were reluctant to join the ministry, and so Somnath Chatterji of the CPI(M) was made the Speaker of the Lok Sabha. And everyone saw what the Left parties that could never hope to seize power in the country could do when they became piggyback rulers. We saw how they were able to call the shots and then suddenly ditch the coalition when they chose to. We saw how the Congress had to take the support of even the Samajwadi Party to win the subsequent vote of confidence. We also saw how the RJD was quick to announce the breaking up of ties with the Congress as soon as the 14th Lok Sabha came to an end.
There can be no doubt that we are heading for a hung Parliament that will doubtless be worse than the previous Lok Sabha. The Congress attempt to foist Rahul Gandhi as Prime Minister is going to make the task of cobbling up a coalition even more difficult. Even if the Left parties were to support the Congress in a critical situation in order to save ‘secularism’, they would be far less willing to go along as part of a coalition with the Congress with Rahul Gandhi as PM. So there is the likelihood of even worse horse-trading at the end of the present Lok Sabha elections than there was last time or during the recent trial of strength of the UPA government. As it is, the country is spending 88 per cent more money this time than it did for the 14th Lok Sabha elections. This time money is being paid out directly to voters. This explains why an illiterate and arrogant Congressman like Manikumar Subba who has even now given two places of birth - one in his nomination paper and another to the media - is still a hot favourite with the Congress. The fact that his own community in his Lok Sabha constituency has disowned him and pledged not to vote for him seems to be of no consequence with his party because the moneybags that can buy Bangladeshi votes for himself and others are with him. That is what we have managed to turn democracy into - a polity in which no upright and efficient citizen who is a patriot can ever find a place because he cannot obviously have the kind of resources far beyond his known sources of income that are needed to buy votes. Politicians alone seem to be able to make that kind of money in five years flat. Even Rahul Gandhi’s declared personal wealth this time is about ten times what it was in 2004. This is the model of democracy that the world’s largest democracy practises today. THE SENTINEL
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