Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India (12 page)

If these changes are brought about, the quality and impact of governance will definitely improve. The challenges before us are huge. We need a second Green Revolution in agriculture. Education needs a drastic revamp, including at the primary level to eradicate the shame of illiteracy. Even basic health care is inaccessible for too many of our citizens. Economic growth and productivity urgently need an enabling environment. Jobs in millions have to be created. Economic reform and greater integration with the global economy are urgent imperatives. Nor can governance reform, which will directly impact the quality of life of every citizen, be postponed or avoided.

DEMOCRACY

It is the people who constitute a kingdom; like a barren cow, a kingdom without (empowered) people yields nothing.

A person who speaks sweetly but behaves wickedly is like a pitcher full of venom with the appearance of milk on the top.

He who befriends a man whose conduct is vicious, whose vision impure, and who is notoriously crooked, is rapidly ruined.

—
The Arthashastra

In 1947, our founding fathers wisely chose democracy as the polity of the newly independent nation. Parliamentary democracy, based on universal suffrage on the principle of first past the post, was their specific choice, and this was duly enshrined in the Constitution we adopted in 1950. Successive elections have made democracy a way of life for Indians. Given the hundreds of millions who vote in our elections, and the magnitude of the arrangements required every time a general election takes place, the media labelled us the world’s largest democracy. It was not an inaccurate description, and we exulted in this recognition. This is perhaps why we began to take our democratic credentials for granted, and stopped noticing the many serious distortions that had gradually become an inherent part of our democratic functioning. Vested interests, mostly within the democratic system, were quite happy to nurture these distortions, and, indeed, benefit from them. But there are some things about our democracy which are very wrong, and need immediate remedial attention. India needs to graduate to becoming a mature democracy, and no one can help us if we are not prepared to help ourselves.

All of us are aware that, in spite of well-intentioned laws, and the vigilant eye of the EC, the link between unaccounted money and political parties is unquestionable. Money power, far above the prescribed ceilings of the EC, is deployed for elections; the same tainted money funds political parties. Politics has also become the first option for many people with criminal backgrounds. Their use of muscle power and criminal elements to browbeat their way into the central and state legislatures has been well-documented. Dynastic politics, which was earlier the frowned upon exception, has almost become the norm. Political parties have begun to accept the absence of inner party democracy as normal. The sycophancy and cynicism that this breeds is reprehensible. Parliament and state legislatures—the temples of our democratic structure—have long since ceased to be forums of reasoned debate and discussion; instead, they have become the stage for abuse and denigration, violence, vandalism and perpetual adjournments, virtually no business is transacted in there forums. Cynical calculations of caste and creed dominate electoral strategies, and promises are made to woo voters without any real thought being given to actual deliverables. The greatest tragedy of all is that in the public perception, the practice of democratic politics is equated with the absence of idealism. For a nation, whose founding father was a man of the stature of Mahatma Gandhi, this is indeed a great fall.

A strange paradox exists today, wherein more people vote than probably ever before, but more people than ever before perceive politics as a crooked business. Of course, there are always exceptions, but democracy is increasingly seen as synonymous with expediency, horse-trading, lack of ethics, immorality, and the absence of principles. Above all, it is seen as the pursuit, at any cost, of political power. What does this do to the legitimacy of the democratic system? How does this corrode the ideological primacy of the democratic idea? What impact does this have on the faith that the young must necessarily retain in the institution of democracy if it is to survive unscathed well into the future? Given the present sorry state of politics how can we expect talented people to join the profession? What role models does it throw up for people to follow? These are urgent questions that need answers.

We must all share some of the guilt for the disrepair our democracy has fallen into. We have condoned what is wrong, and lived with what we know is not right. We have practised the rituals of democratic procedure, but shut our eyes to the malaise corroding the fundamentals.

Many politicians, and political parties, equate any criticism of our democracy with an insult to democracy itself. They argue that long-established democratic institutions are sacrosanct, and to interrogate their functioning is tantamount to denigrating Parliament and parliamentary practice. This is a fallacious argument, usually parroted by those who have a vested interest in resisting reform and change. Democracy is the unalterable system India has chosen for its polity, and Parliament has an unchallenged place at the helm of the democratic structure. But this does not imply that we are duty bound to condone or overlook what is wrong with the way democracy is functioning. Democracy itself gives to the people of India the right to question. The official sentinels of our democracy cannot argue their case for status quoism on the grounds that anybody who advocates reform of the system is a threat to democracy.

It is also argued that the fact that people vote in elections is an endorsement of the system as it exists. This is far from the truth. People vote because they wish to exercise their democratic choice. This does not mean they are unaware of what is wrong with the way democracy is practised in this country; most often they vote because there aren’t any other practical alternatives available to them. Another argument that is made is that because legislative representatives have been elected by the people, they are somehow immune from all criticism. We know that people of very questionable credentials are often elected by manipulating caste loyalties, or using other unethical means. An electoral victory is a passport to democratic responsibility, not immunity from valid scrutiny.

In any case, the facts in the public realm are far too convincing to prevent legitimate censure or disarm public outrage. The nexus between black money and political parties is the principal cause of all corruption in India. If those who are supposed to make laws against corruption are themselves the products of a corrupt system, how can the rest of society be clean? When parties take money in cash from ‘unidentified’ donors, they work for tax evaders. When candidates illegally spend many times the prescribed limit on elections, their first priority is to milk the state to recoup their ‘investment’. As writer and editor M. J. Akbar puts it bluntly: ‘There is a cancer at the heart of our democracy; our electoral system is fuelled by black money rather than white funds.’
¹²
India is among the lowest scoring countries on political finance regulation according to the Global Integrity Report for 2011. India scored zero out of a hundred on implementation and disclosure of political party and candidate financing. It also scored a zero on the effectiveness of its party financing regulations.
¹³

To take just one example, let us look at informal estimates of the money spent by parties and candidates on the state elections in U.P., Goa, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Manipur in 2012. The figure stands at over
2,000 crore. ‘The EC can do little’, Kuldip Nayar writes, ‘because money is distributed at unknown (sic) places, generally in the dead of the night. No Lokpal can get . . . wind of this because votes are purchased at an individual level. And each constituency has hundreds of people employed by political parties’.
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Black money is also circulated six to eight months in advance of elections to evade monitoring by the EC. Spending by a ‘friend’ or supporter, who is reimbursed later, is a common ploy. Individual candidates routinely spend crores in cash on election campaigns. It has been estimated that something in the vicinity of
10,000 crore was spent in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, and one-fourth of this was black money.

It is no coincidence that most of the donations received by political parties are below the ceiling of
20,000, beyond which, under current law, they have to disclose the identity of the contributor. In fact, estimates indicate that as much as 90 per cent of the total funds collected by major parties are from ‘undisclosed’ contributors. For instance, between 2007 and 2009 the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) got
200 crore; not one rupee came by cheque. In the same period, the Samajwadi Party received
55 crore, of which merely
50 lakh was by cheque. The BJP received
297 crore of which
55 crore was by cheque, and the Congress got
72 crore, of which
35 crore was by cheque.
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According to the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), an NGO, 85 per cent of the donors to the Congress and the BJP are faceless. The system itself, therefore, allows parties to collect vast sums in cash without any obligation to credibly explain the source of this funding.