V. Ramani's web SUNDAY UVACHA

India benefited in two ways from her association with Great Britain — the English language and a parliamentary system of government. But there is a third useful lesson India can learn from Britain: how to conduct the election of the leader of a political party. The process that has played out in the British Conservative Party after the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in July this year stands out in stark contrast to the confused muddle in conducting the election for the President of the Indian National Congress (INC).

The procedure for election of the leader of the Conservative Party, who would become the Prime Minister, involved a two-stage process. In the first stage, Conservative MPs voted for selecting the two candidates who would confront each other for the top job. This exercise narrowed the choice down to Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, with the former emerging the winner in an election where over 80 percent of over 170,000 Conservative Party members exercised their franchise.

Contrast this with the process that has characterised the election of the President of the INC. With the anointed heir apparent to the throne playing the reluctant suitor, the election was fixed for 17th October, rather close to the crucial state assembly elections slated for December/January. Noises from various party functionaries and carefully planted media reports made it obvious that there ought to be a consensus candidate favourable to the party high command, without the need for an election. With Shashi Tharoor throwing his hat into the ring, the election process, however, had to be gone through.

In an age when electronic lists are the norm and the British Conservative Party can conduct online elections involving 170,000 plus members, the INC’s delay in releasing a list of under 10,000 PCC members bordered on the ludicrous. After much urging from some party members, the existing lists of these 9000 plus members were made available to the candidates standing for election. The campaign by the two candidates revealed clearly the culture that prevails in the party. In state after state, party functionaries preferred to go along with Mallikarjun Kharge, seen as the “high command” candidate, despite his contention that he has his independent position on various issues. The party old guard did not look too kindly on the younger interloper, and it is little wonder that the election was a one-sided affair reminiscent in style if not in degree of the INC President election of 2000, which brought Sonia Gandhi to the helm of affairs.

The high command structure in place in the INC since the time of Indira Gandhi has played havoc with the INC’s regional power bases, leading to election fiascos for the party in state after state, and at the national level. Maharashtra is a prime example: no INC CM after 1972 has spent a full five years in office. With dissidence against incumbent CMs having become the norm, it is little surprise that the INC has had 12 CMs in the 36 years it was in power in Maharashtra between 1972 and 2014. As in UP and Bihar, the INC is fast losing its relevance in Maharashtra, occupying fourth place (44 seats) in the number of MLAs in the assembly, a far cry from 1985, when it held 161 seats. The failure of the INC to establish its electoral dominance in national and most state elections since 2014 is, at one level, an outcome of the disgruntlement of state-level leaders — Punjab, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have all witnessed revolts against the party leadership.

An ambitious politician finds her/his path to the top obstructed by the “old guard” and/or by a suspicious leadership. Ambition not being seen as a desirable quality, contenders for a more meaningful role in the party are compelled to switch to other political formations.

Coupled with ambition are the two vices of greed and fear. Politics offers easy pickings through patronage networks and the non-transparent nature of decision making in government departments. This tendency has been accentuated in recent years by the allure of inducements for switching sides immediately after elections or sometime between two general elections, the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India having repeatedly failed in checking defections midstream. The disease of treating ministerial posts as avenues for personal aggrandisement also renders most politicians vulnerable to investigations by law enforcement agencies, a tool which comes in handy for the party in power to arm-twist politicians into shifting their loyalties. A former Maharashtra Congress Minister has openly admitted that he breathes easy ever since he switched sides.

The drama that surrounded the INC presidential election is symptomatic of the disease that affects ALL political parties in India. Most parties in India are family-managed enterprises, where the hereditary right of succession seems to be a given, regardless of whether the successor displays any political ability. Even where there is no “dynasty culture”, the party morphs into an outfit run by one or more leaders, with a small coterie to advise them. Both at the state and national levels, the preference is to nominate persons for specific posts based on their loyalty to the party bigwigs or to ram through candidates for party and government leadership on the basis of the choice of the high command.

In such a scenario, loyalty and commitment to the party’s ideology (if it has one, in the first place) and to its success in elections are replaced by individual expediency. Almost overnight, politicians spout rhetoric that was anathema to them just a short while earlier and eulogise their new leaders whom they had no qualms about abusing and criticising while in the earlier party.

The noted author Ramachandra Guha had, fifteen years ago, characterised India as a 50-50 democracy. More recently, he downgraded this rating to 30-70. Given the absence of inner party democracy across the board in Indian politics, one wonders if India is nearer a 10-90 democracy.