At a crucial juncture of history, when people’s quest for pluralism, tolerance and socio-economic inclusion is taking a revolutionary shape world over, South Asia finds itself stranded at crossroads. As an increasingly young population representing the subcontinent’s ancient society ventures into uncharted terrain to confront institutional apathy, Indian democracy faces a foundational challenge too. And when a constitutional authority laments that the nation has failed miserably to make electoral democracy “fully representative,” it is bound to raise a few eyebrows in a country known to be this planet’s largest functional democracy.
Vice President Hamid Ansari, it seems, has finally mustered up the courage to set the cat among the pigeons by calling a spade a spade. Though active citizens have been taking to legal recourse intermittently in an effort to clean up the political and electoral process, this is the first time that a person sitting in high office has denounced the current system of elections — the plinth of India’s democratic superstructure. The vice president’s plain speaking is surely going to trigger panic in the larger political circle. Addressing a function organized by the Election Commission of India to encourage enrolment of new voters in the country, Ansari, who adds up as the chairman of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Indian parliament, questioned the very representativeness of lawmakers. Indeed, a comparative study of the official electoral figures reveals that a vast majority of successful candidates actually wins without even securing 50 percent of the popular vote cast. Today, 82.68 percent of India’s parliamentarians lack majority support and the situation in provincial assemblies are no better. India’s tryst with electoral democracy started in 1952 and sixty-one years down the line, the edifice, modeled primarily after the British parliamentary system seems to be inducing divisive tendencies and social conflict.
The bane of a democratic structure that survives on minority vote is the tendency of political parties functioning therein to focus on segmentation of the society leading to formation of marginalized social groups. No wonder why India has been a helpless witness to uncontrolled proliferation of political outfits whose ideology reinforces the social tensions already prevalent in the country’s ethnic fabric. In the words of Vice President Ansari, such electoral procedures and practices have accentuated rather than diminish social cleavages.
India today is confronted with a new language of democracy after experimenting with a colossal democratic constitutional structure. A country known for her centuries-old traditions of monarchical autocracy and oligarchic feudalism did evolve a mechanism, through trial and error, to strengthen the democratic foundations. In between the creeping in of some avoidable vices has tarnished the whole process. True, in the vast set up of the gigantic territorial dimensions of modern day commonwealths, it is impossible to reproduce direct democracy or rule of people that once operated in Periclean Athens.
The present form of democracy is all about giving the masses a right to express their consent of being governed by a set of executives. It is only when these representatives go astray that a nation slides down a “slippery slope.” India finds herself in a similar situation with citizens blaming rudderless and unethical politics to be the source of all the major problems gripping the country today. The unending scandals and controversies can lead us to a situation of a vast majority of people loosing their faith in democratic values and traditions. Unfortunately, when a handful of elites with billion dollar asset base starts controlling policy making, the rest of the majority who lives on paltry earning are bound to get agitated and question the efficacy of the existing system. Even the vice president accepts that the nation has allowed money power in all its manifestations to distort electoral outcomes thus depicting ideological decadence.
For the system to be improved upon, so that they may adequately reflect preferences, affinities and aspirations of the people, an overhaul of the antiquated representation of people act dealing with conduct of elections and improprieties therein is a must. In order to effectively implement the electoral reforms that have virtually become a nationwide popular demand and make it functional in real sense, the Election Commission needs to concentrate on two vital aspects — role of illegal money and muscle power in polls and criminalization of politics. Though the supervising authority of elections in India has put stronger measures to prevent use of illegal cash in the vote procedure, the ills of the current political funding mechanism has a far deeper root. Many believe that state funding can minimize the insidious influence of black money on our electoral process. Furthermore, empowering the electorate with the “right to recall” will keep the people’s representatives on a tight leash. In any successful republic, a robust intra-party democracy forms a critical pillar for entrenchment of transparent democratic culture and practice. Unfortunately, every political outfit in India displays a common lethargy when it comes to the issue of conducting regular organizational polls and creating a code of conduct based on ethics and morality. It is therefore not unusual to discover a large number of lawbreakers turning into statute framers in one of the most vibrant democracies of the world. And these are the very people who are opposed to any changes in status quo. Perhaps, it is high time that this nation heeds the advice of Hamid Ansari and move beyond the “first past the post” system of elections in vogue to plug the lacunas. Who knows, this might hasten India’s return to a stable political order.
