Strengthening democracy

When I think about things we can do to ensure that democracy survives, improves and flourishes in India throughout the foreseeable future, the following, it seems to me, have become absolutely urgent.

 

We should drastically amend the Representation of the Peoples Act and other basic laws to provide that

1.      Political parties cannot proliferate endlessly, with almost indistinguishable manifestos and differentiated only by their leaders who fight and drift apart from mother parties to satisfy their own egos, ambitions and narrow interests,

2.      Make the Election Commission a truly powerful and impartial body, supervised by Parliament alone (with a strong voice for the opposition which the ruling party cannot steamroll), which will monitor all political activity of all parties and not only just before and after elections,

3.      Parties must be commitment bound to deliver on at least most of their pre-election promises or resign from power, and no party may criticize government policies which it itself espoused strenuously while in power,

4.      Electoral constituencies must have the power of recalling their representatives at any time after the first year if they turn out to be duds, frauds or downright criminals,

5.      Serious and repeat offenders of a criminal nature (which must include election fraud) must be permanently barred from standing for elections,

6.      All parties must fully and honestly publicize their sources of funding, itemized in case of all large donations, and parliament and courts must stringently monitor which donors are being unlawfully favoured when those parties are in power,

7.      All legitimately recognized parties must be publicly funded, at least up to 80% of their needs, and allow compulsory audit of their finances.

8.      The Constitution must be amended to spell out very specific rules about how elections and politics may be done, and the High and Supreme courts must exercise unceasing, strict and minute supervision over the whole process, perhaps assisted by a public ombudsman.

9.      Illegitimate, coercive muscle power must be removed from the political arena by an all-round consensus among all contending parties. Investigative agencies must not function at the whim and behest of executive authority, but only under parliamentary and court supervision, with stringent media oversight.

10.  The mass media must commit themselves to genuinely fearless, probing, analytical and impartial reporting,

11.  Accredited, well-respected, well educated social workers must be encouraged to join politics en masse after they have made their reputations in their chosen fields of service,

12.  The well-off elite with time and leisure on their hands must be encouraged likewise to join public service, so that they are not easily lured by the temptation of misgoverning to make big bucks quickly for themselves and their kin.

13.  All political parties whose agenda openly spread lying and hateful fiction about their perceived ‘enemies’ in society must be put beyond the pale, once and for all, whether they are on the left or right, religious or atheistic, whether they are feminists or misogynists, casteists and vegans or those who want to kill casteists and vegans.

14.  Civil society NGOs with good and long-standing reputations must be strongly encouraged to take a hand in the political process (in this context, read this article).

15.  All elected leaders, from town councillors to PMs, as soon as they start behaving like kings and despots, must be summarily removed from office as soon as a minimum number of genuine complaints have been registered, which may vary from 100 in case of a panchayat pradhan to 100,000 for a prime minister.

16.  Since the permanent rather than elected executive actually runs the day to day administration and deals with all citizen needs, requests and demands (sarkari naukars, from the peon right up to the department IAS secretary), and since they have acquired a deep, abiding and countrywide reputation for being incompetent, unwilling, grossly unhelpful and venal on the whole, all political parties must come together to remove or cure this scourge once and for all – a sarkari naukar will work hard according to well defined standards day in, day out round the year all his working life, to be judged only by his clients and supplicants, or be first warned, then suspended, then dismissed, and finally in extreme cases jailed. There is no other way of clearing this particular Augean stable without making a frightening example of a few tens of thousands of careers and lives ruined. It has gone on for far too long.

17.  Voter education must be made a very serious and compulsory part of school education right from class 6 to 12, so that when they start choosing their candidates, they may not vote like ignorant or brainwashed idiots (as even most college graduates do in this country). This ‘education’ must clearly teach growing generations what they should ask of their elected representatives, as well as what they should not ask or expect.

18.  Much more power should be devolved down to the states, and further onwards to the lower units of local self government, so long as they commit formally that they are all going to obey the Constitution, never dream of seceding, and accept a minimum template of duties and commitments to the voters that has been set by higher levels of government – indices that can be constantly monitored, measured and commented upon, like crime rates and literacy rates and employment rates and pollution levels, to mention just a few.

19.  Absurd, out of date and utterly anti-democratic laws like the sedition act must be repealed and thrown into the dustbin of history. Every citizen must be free and unafraid to air his views on any subject of public concern, as long as her views are reasonable and informed.

20.  Learning from the best practices of all nations which are widely recognized as successful democracies must be made mandatory for all who dream of being our future leaders.

 

Achieving all this will take time, but a beginning must be made, now. Even ten years later it might be too late, and democracy might dissolve into first anarchy and then autocracy, as it has often done in many countries.

Achieving all twenty of the above will be very hard, and all of them may never be fully achieved. Also, in the off chance that they are indeed all achieved, it still won’t make for a perfect democracy – nothing is ever perfect, certainly not something as complex and messy as a democracy of such gigantic proportions – but India will certainly become a much better place to live in.

The whole question is whether a sufficient number of intelligent, wise, civic minded citizens are at all keen enough to preserve and improve democracy in India. From what I have seen over a period of nearly fifty years of observation and reflection – I have been politically conscious from a very early age – I fear that that might not be the case. If that is true, democracy in India is doomed, and, despite being one who is painfully aware of the drawbacks of democracy, I would opine that that would be a disaster for almost all of us.

One last word.  I first wrote out a similar list of desiderata in 1987 to help out a friend who was going to sit for the UPSC examinations. Thirty six years on, I have found little reason to make major changes in the list – indeed, I wrote this one out almost off the cuff. Shows both how little India has changed in the intervening years as much as how stable my own opinions have remained.

[It should be obvious to any mindful reader that I do not side blindly with any single existing political party or ideology. For instance, much that the TMC or BJP are currently doing might be wrong or bad or simply misguided, but I know and remember too much of the CPIM and Congress eras to imagine naively that everything will be hunky dory if only they can return to power, having learnt nothing about honest and good governance in the intervening years out in the wilderness]