OUR DEMOCRACY NEEDS A HEALTH CHECKUP

Our Indian democracy gets thumbs up for our massive electoral process, the civil liberties that we enjoy, a vibrant free press and a pluralistic society. However our democracy gets thumbs down because of mediocre political participation and political culture, ineptitude, massive corruption and opportunism. So when we decide to do a health checkup we need to know the history of the problem and then find the extent of the disease.

The establishment which has ruled our country for most of these 67 years had systematically seen to it that the nation was excluded from the natural political evolution from a British colony to a proud nation. It ensured that we remained mired in despotic and near tyrannical rule over polities that were politically and economically stagnant and functioned primarily to serve the interests of the despots and their immediate coterie, as well as Western interests, rather than those of our countrymen.

There was a time, before 1947, when people would look up to the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Bose, Sardar Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Mahamana Madan Mohan Malvia, Sir Syed Ali and Jawahar Lal Nehru and aspire to be like one of them! Then something went radically wrong. Personal ambitions crept into the mind of a few and the fate of the would be nation took a back seat. We were made to believe that the secular nation could not exist as one, and it was absolutely essential to divide it along religious lines. But, did these select few, on either sides of the religious divide, have the mandate of the people from Gwadar to Arunachal and from Kashmir to Kanyakumari? Who gave them the democratic right to sit across the table with a non sincere British mediator and arbitrarily divide our motherland? Looking back you now know why they did so. It was the easier alternative.

Leaders do what it right, and not what is easy. If leaders are swayed by the passion of the moment and go with the crowd then what you get is mobocracy and not democracy. Our freedom struggle did not start and end in 1947 with inputs from one family, it had a glorious history from 1857 and since then martyrs like Mangal Pandey, Khudiram, Binoy, Badal, Dinesh, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Rajguru, Sukhdev Raj and many more made the supreme sacrifice for our independence. And if you ever go to the Cellular Jail in Port Blair you will see that people from all works of life, all religion and all cultures went hand in hand to the gallows for this sacred cause. Did they opt for two separate nations divided by the sword of religion? I don’t think so.

So, did we start our nationhood on a democratic note? Or were a few people in a hurry to grab power and become important? This is a very uncomfortable question and we have repeatedly dodged it. Historically there was a leadership crisis for which we are paying the price with crippling interest today. We sidelined democratically chosen leaders like Subhash Bose and opted for handpicked ones. Handpicked leaders do not represent the Nation, they represent their coterie, their party, their commune, their religion, their caste, their linguistic group……but not the NATION!

In democracy there can be no short cuts. The people have to choose the leader and even if it is a herculean task to know the minds of over a billion people, it has to be done and their opinion needs to be respected and not distorted lest we make the same mistakes all over again! The task is not easy - an estimated 814.5 million people were eligible to vote. This is up from 713 million voters in 2009, representing an impressive 14 percent increase, with the largest increase in voter registrations coming from younger Indians. Elections were held in 28 Indian states and 7 union territories. The Election Commission required a polling place within 1.2 miles of every voter. To fulfill this mandate it had 10 million polling officials and security personnel in 930,000 polling stations. So the first challenge our democracy faces is size.

The second challenge is that elections do not guarantee a decisive result. We have two national parties and well over 50 regional or state political parties and taking federalism to a bizarre limit it was the regional parties that were, till recently, collectively deciding the fate of the Central government by bringing parties with contrasting ideologies together into unholy and opportunistic alliances. Unwieldy and sometimes uncooperative coalitions often hinder economic reforms and foster corruption, as we saw in the last government.

The third challenge is the increasing criminalization of our politics. 30 percent of the candidates have a criminal case against them. India's National Election Watch announced that of the 162 parliamentarians involved in 306 criminal cases, 76 were charged with serious crimes like murder, attempted murder and kidnapping. How can they be trusted with the job of governance?

The fourth problem is from the corrosive influence of money in elections and more than 75 percent of the source of funds to Indian political parties is unknown. Of the sources that are known, 87 percent of the funding comes from the corporate sector or business houses. If business houses pay the leaders to get elected, then why should they not expect a quid pro co?

The fifth problem with our democracy is its failure to produce representative results. Let me give you an example. There are 10,000 votes in a constituency: 5,000 abstain, 2,000 vote for the lesser parties. The winning candidate gets 1,600 votes, the second candidate gets 1,400. The candidate with 1,600 votes out of 10,000 wins! So this result is hardly representative. To address this we need to make voting compulsory by law but then the election is a mechanism, which ultimately represents the will of the people. Not allowing a person to vote negatively defeats freedom of expression and (the right to liberty in) Article 21!! So there are no easy answers.

Yes, we have done well to choose democracy and we are trying to nurture it but if we do not root out the influence of money and muscle power in our elections and ensure accountability of our elected representatives, we may end up like many other failed democracies.