Announcing that he would destroy the “three M’s — money power, muscle power, and minister power,” that had distorted past Indian elections, Seshan strictly imposed the legal spending limit of four and a half lakh rupees ($13,150) permitted each candidate, a figure so laughably out of touch with contemporary political reality that no one stayed within its limits if they could afford not to. (Though actual expenditure varies from constituency to constituency, India Today estimated in early 1996 that each major contestant for the South Bombay seat in the Lok Sabha planned to spend five crore rupees, more than a hundred times the permitted amount.) Any irregularities resulted immediately in polls being countermanded in the affected area and repolling ordered in more than a thousand places, effectively negating the habitual intimidation and “booth capturing” (the takeover of polling stations by thugs who proceed to stuff the ballot boxes with votes for their candidate) that had prevailed in certain lawless areas of northern India, particularly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The ubiquitous posters and graffiti displayed in public spaces and even on the walls of unwilling private citizens were ordered removed; election meetings had to end by 10:30 p.m.; the use of loudspeakers was restricted, and the propensity to appeal to voters on “communal” grounds, or to exhort them by incitations to hatred, was forbidden on pain of punishment; and votes were counted under the unblinking gaze of a video camera recording every ballot passing through the hands of the returning officers. The result was an election that was widely considered dull, colorless, uneventful, and boring — but was unquestionably the freest and fairest India had ever known.
“Anyone who had one-tenth of this job would quail at the challenges,” Seshan was reported as saying of his efforts to rein in India’s irrepressible politicians. “When people ask me if I’m Jesus, I say, ‘Sorry, I’m only Moses.”’ The commandments he brought down to Indian electoral politics were, however, out of the ordinary. One of his decisions was to outlaw the use of small animals among the electoral symbols adopted by each party to aid illiterate voters. Past elections had witnessed candidates strangling birds symbolizing their opponents, so Seshan decided to allow only larger creatures as symbols on the sound principle that “you can’t easily wring the neck of an elephant or tiger.”
Seshan stands out because of the scale of his achievement and the nationwide impact of his efforts. But even his successes and the similar impact of one of his successors, J. M. Lyngdoh, have only made a dent in the problem of the system fostered under Congress Party dominance, a system of patronage and jobbery, kickbacks and payoffs, bribery and malfeasance. Elections are a tool, but the entire system needs an overhaul: there is little point in having a smooth-running tractor if the field it is meant to plow is overflowing with refuse. That is not too great an overstatement of public attitudes to Indian politics today.
Indeed, for proof that independent India still has a long way to go to evolve the kind of democratic civil society dreamed of by Nehru, one has to look no further than the criminalization of political life in India, the dimensions of which have been graphically described by a former top civil servant, ex—cabinet secretary B. G. Deshmukh, in searing terms:
Anti-social elements, including blackmarketeers, have always tried to cultivate politicians to safeguard their interests and also to protect them from the due process of law. Before Independence, their efforts did not make any headway. . . . The pre-Independence political leadership consisted of gentlemen who had unblemished character. Almost all of them gave up [a] comfortable living and even lucrative professional positions to enter politics only to serve me people of the country. It was unthinkable for any anti-social element to approach them for favors, direct or indirect. . . . Since independence, . . . politicians started finding that anti-social elements were . . . quite useful for getting funds for fighting elections. These elements also [discovered] the attraction and convenience of holding political positions which not only gave them social status but also a certain immunity. . . . When the politicians started realizing that their party apparatus was not fully capable of mobilizing voters or that their opponents [did better] by adopting irregular methods, a general feeling [arose]. . . . that there was nothing wrong in taking the help of anti-social elements. This phenomenon led to various irregular electoral practices. Wim the help of the brutal force or muscle power at the disposal of these anti-social elements, unscrupulous politicians [altered electoral rolls or interfered with the vote]. . . . Booth capturing and bogus voting naturally followed. This gave rise to organized groups and in some cases even organized gangs which were available for a price to a politician. In some areas, groups of certain castes and communities formed such gangs . . . to enforce their will on the electorate. . . . When this situation became all-pervasive, anti-social elements thought that instead of merely fighting somebody’s battle, they could themselves enter the fray. They had the inherent advantage of money power and muscle power. Since most of the political parties were interested only in winning elections, they did not mind giving tickets [party nominations] to such candidates howsoever undesirable they may be. This was the beginning of the end.
Deshmukh’s indictment points to the most dangerous phenomenon of independent India’s political life, the criminalization of politics. One might even speak of it as the politicization of criminals, for (as he suggests) many a law-breaker has found it useful to become a law-maker. The CPM member of Parliament Harkishan Singh Surjeet told me that of the 535 members of the lower house (Lok Sabha) of India’s Parliament in 1996, as many as a hundred may have had criminal records. India’s police, never quite paragons of law enforcement and frequently subject to political interference, found more reasons for demoralization in the discovery that the very criminals they were pursuing or seeking to prosecute could become their political masters the next day.
A few weeks into the term of the United Front government, the press revealed that its minister of state for home affairs, Mohammed Taslimuddin, had no fewer than eighteen criminal cases pending against him in the courts, not for overenthusiastic electioneering or politically linked offenses but for the entirely unparliamentary activities of kidnapping, rape, molestation, and attempted murder. Taslimuddin, who had not actually been convicted in any of these cases yet (but against whom the evidence had been found to be plausible by a committee appointed by the legislative assembly of his home state, Bihar), finally resigned, but not before alleging religious bigotry on the part of his accusers (he is a Muslim, and the government felt obliged to defuse the charge by appointing another Muslim MP to the job). To the newspaper-reading middle class, the fact that someone with this sort of background could even be considered for such august office was dismaying enough, without the post in question being in the ministry entrusted with supervising India’s internal law-and-order machinery (including the police, internal security, and intelligence; though the government pointed out that those departments of the ministry were supervised directly by the cabinet minister, not the minister of state, the fact was that when Taslimuddin held office, no cabinet minister for home affairs had yet been appointed). Worse still was the realization that it is precisely the criminal connections and conduct of some politicians that give them the clout to become viable candidates for high office in the first place; Taslimuddin had, after all, been nominated for a ministerial berth by the powerful chief minister of Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav.
If there were, as Mr. Surjeet believed, ninety-nine other Taslimuddins in the 1996 Parliament, it is more than a disturbing statistic; but worse, reports indicated that the Parliament elected in 2004 included not just a hundred but 113 “charge-sheeters. “ Sociologists have long analyzed the class composition of India’s legislatures and traced the important change from a post-independence Parliament dominated by highly educated professionals to one more truly representative of the rural heartland of India. The typical member of Parliament today, the joke runs, is a lower-caste farmer with a law degree he’s never used. But the electability, particularly from the
northern states, of figures referred to openly in the press as “Mafia dons,” “dacoit [bandit] leaders” and “antisocial elements” is a poor reflection on the way the electoral process has served Indian democracy. The resultant alienation of the educated middle class means that fewer and fewer of them trouble to go to the polls on election day. Whereas psephological studies in the United States have demonstrated that the poor do not vote in significant numbers in national elections, the opposite is true in India; it is the poor who are willing to take the time to queue up in large numbers in the hot sun, believing their votes will make a difference, whereas the relatively more privileged members of society, knowing their views and numbers will do little to influence the outcome, have been increasingly staying away from the polls. Voter studies of the 1996 elections demonstrated that the lowest stratum of Indian society, the “very poor,” vote in numbers well above the national average, while graduates turn out in numbers well below.
The abstention of the highly educated from the polls is only a symptom of a more debilitating loss of faith in the political process itself. Only 25 percent of Indians questioned in a Gallup poll in April 1996 expressed confidence in Parliament, whereas 77 percent said they trusted the judiciary. Defections and horse-trading are common, political principle rare. The spectacle of legislators in one state assembly after another being “paraded” before a speaker or a governor to prove a contested majority, or — worse still — being “held hostage” in hotels by their leaders so they cannot be suborned by rivals until their claims to majority are accepted, has done little to inspire confidence in the integrity of India’s parliamentarians. Their occasional descent into brawls on the floor of the assemblies, which have recorded numerous instances of fisticuffs, jostling, and the flinging of footwear, is hardly likely to inspire reverence either. (It is hardly surprising that respect for the country’s political parties has not grown. In 1968,41 percent of the Indian people believed it made no difference which party was in power in the country, and when asked to identify themselves with a political parry, 67 percent indicated no affinity to any in particular. In a 1996 poll, the figures had not changed significantly: 69 percent declared that they did not feel close to any political party, and 63 percent answered “no” when asked if they felt India’s elected representatives cared for the people.)
But far more dangerous to Indian democracy than the deficiencies of its guardians is the scale of violence in the country. Violence is an inescapable reality for the newspaper reader; one cannot turn the pages of the press without being sickened by the daily occurrence of riots, clashes, rapes in custody, incidents of the powerful taking the law into their own hands (typified by the frequency with which the press reports episodes of poor women being stripped naked and paraded through the streets of villages to humiliate them or members of their family into doing as they are told). The democratic Indian state seems to be able to do little to end such occurrences, though individual police officers, administrators, and judges have shown great courage and commitment in the pursuit of justice. The Marathi newspaper Navakal once compared the Indian state to the drunken husband who contributes nothing to the household himself but beats his wife to obtain the money she has worked hard to earn — a telling image in a country where such domestic events are commonplace. There is no doubt that the combination of violence and corruption, flourishing with impunity under the protection of the democratic state, discredits democracy itself: too many cynics see democracy in India as a process that has given free rein to criminals and corrupt cops, opportunists and fixers, murderous musclemen and grasping middlemen, kickback-making politicos and bribe-taking bureaucrats, Mafia dons and private armies, caste groups and religious extremists. Of course this is a caricature of a far more complex reality, but it is a plausible enough portrait of what the middle class sees to lead thoughtful Indians to worry about the viability of democracy itself.
And yet our own inherent incompetence offers grounds for hope. Democracy is not always the most efficient form of government, but it is vastly preferable to those systems in which the police are the most efficient organ of the state. The occasional corruption, ineptitude, and complacency of the Indian police is properly the subject of anguished criticism by Indians, but in these qualities may also lie the best hope for the survival of Indian democracy.
* * *
What makes political conflict endemic in any state? Economic need is an obvious part of the answer; politics is the pursuit of economics by other means. Individuals and groups in quest of means to satisfy their economic desires seek political power in order to advance their interests; this is a basic fact of any polity. In order to pursue power, they organize themselves, in most democratic systems, into political parties, each party united by a common set of political principles that articulate their convictions about how society should be organized (usually to the greatest benefit of their supporters). In a strong multiparty system, the party is identified clearly with core beliefs and traditions that its supporters share, and it deals with differences of emphasis or personality within that framework of beliefs through self-regulating mechanisms that resolve disputes without threatening the basic party structures. In India, neither has been the case; except for a handful of “ideological” parties (the Communists, the Swatantra for a brief period, and the Jana Sangh and its successor the BJP), there is a profusion of parties that all believe in more or less the same thing (socialism, secularism, nonalignment, affirmative action, state control of the “commanding heights” of the economy). Nor are there effective internal elections or comparable processes for resolving intraparty differences; whenever a dispute gets serious enough, the party splits or the disgruntled individual leaves the party, with the result that most of India’s major politicians have at one time or another served under more than one party affiliation (and in many cases four or five). Whereas in most other democracies, a politician changing party is a major development calling for dramatic headlines, in India parties have become mere labels, to be peeled off and replaced as convenient.
The weakness of the party system has meant that all too often politicians organize themselves around other identities than party (or create parties to reflect a particularist identity). It is ironic that one of the early strengths of independent India — the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of all the major political tendencies in the country — turned out, in hindsight, to have undermined the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. There is no doubt that the political dominance of the Congress, its maintenance of support through a complex process of networking and ex change, its agglomerative ecumenism, all made the party a major integrative institution in independent India. But had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three parties — one right-of-center, one social democrat, one Communist — a culture of principle might have evolved in India’s political contention. Instead the survival of the eclectic Congress for decades as India’s dominant party stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, such as Rajaji’s pro-free enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) emerged largely in the form of the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression.
These identities tend, in the Indian context, to involve caste or religion; the Bahujan Samaj (“Majority People’s”) Party is a party of and for the Dalits or “Untouchables,” the Akali Dal a party of and for Sikhs, and so on (though there are, of course, Untouchables and Sikhs in other parties as well). The result is that instead of parties distinguished by political principle, Indian politics too often offers the spectacle of a choice between different group identities. Where divisions occur within such identities — as in the two Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu spawned from the same anti-Congress movement in the state — the choice becomes one between personalities, not principles. Differences that in other democracies might produce intraparty rivalries lead, in India, to
new parties altogether.
This is not merely a lament for the loss of principle in our country’s political debate; it is also a dirge, because clashes between groups organized around sectarian identities tend to have more destructive consequences than clashes between socialists and free-marketers. No Indian election has been wholly free of violence, though the 1996 elections organized by T. N. Seshan came close; still, it is a sad commentary on our society that we are able to congratulate ourselves on an election in which “only” seven people were killed.
An added complication in India is the extraordinary role, for a democracy, that the state has come to play in the economic life of the country, so that competition for political power in the state has become competition for the power to control, to regulate, and to benefit through the process of appropriating, dividing, and distributing the economic resources of the state. For a while the Indian government was able to use this power to stem internal conflict by subsidizing crucial interest groups, co-opting leaders of traditionally “backward” or underprivileged communities, ensuring that no region or religion felt underrepresented in the highest offices of the state, and balancing competing interests by ensuring that no one group was seen to be gaining or losing more than the others in the way in which the state arranged its affairs. But these methods could only go so far; Untouchables mollified with reserved seats in Parliament and the state assemblies began to ask themselves why they could not transform their votes into political power for themselves; “backwards” saw their cabinet posts as tokenism and hungered for the top office in each state; some religious or other minorities rejected the state itself, feeling that nothing less than separation could guarantee them the power that their numbers could never give them in India as a whole. (It is an attitude chillingly reminiscent of the notorious remark made by a Yugoslav politician as that country was breaking up in 1991 : “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine?”)
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