Posts Tagged ‘Lok Sabha’

30 Jun

50 years on…history repeats itself

Posted by vramani in political economy, public affairs. Tagged: , , .

June 25 is a date that has long receded in my memory. The sudden invocation of this date by the Prime Minister at the start of the 18th Lok Sabha triggered off many memories. I remember standing at a bus stop in Delhi on the morning of 26 June 1975 when I heard of the imposition of the emergency in India. I reached home to hear the voice of Indira Gandhi announcing the imposition of the internal emergency. As a politically naive college student with a passing interest in politics, the implications of the Emergency never struck home till far later. I saw the first display of opposition to the emergency when protesting students, including the then Delhi University Students’ Union President Arun Jaitley, were rounded up by the police and bundled into buses before their incarceration in prison.

Over the next 18 months till the end of 1976, we, the citizens of India, were bombarded with news of the remarkable changes taking place in the economy and society (reminiscent of the pronouncements in Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984). As news of the demolitions in Turkman Gate in Delhi and the forced sterilisations filtered through to us through a largely quiescent print media, disgust and cynicism started building up in the general public. The 1977 Lok Sabha elections blew the safety cover off the pressure cooker, with the Congress party getting the least number of seats in 25 years after the 1952 elections.

The past few years are strangely reminiscent of the Emergency: the difference is in the use of the knife rather than the hammer to injure the body politic. The use of MISA during the emergency to detain political opponents has been replaced by laws like the UAPA and PMLA, which have been used to arrest those voicing dissent against or opposing the ruling dispensation, ostensibly on the vaguely worded grounds of threat to the integrity or sovereignty of India or the likelihood of striking terror in people or for economic offences. Just as the use of MISA was made immune from judicial review during the emergency through inclusion in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, the stringent provisions for grant of bail under Section 43D(5) of the UAPA and Section 45(1) of the PMLA make it very difficult to secure bail, as they virtually require an opinion of the judiciary that no prima facie case establishing guilt has been made out. The continued incarceration of a number of the accused in the Bhima-Koregaon case and of a serving Chief Minister and a former Deputy Chief Minister are evidence of the reluctance of the judiciary to grant bail even when the accused pose no flight risk and are not likely to tamper with the evidence or influence witnesses. As in MISA, the present scenario allows for continued detention for long periods while the investigating agencies take their own time to file chargesheets and the judicial process moves at a snail’s pace.

The cavalier attitude of the administration towards the rule of law is another feature common to the emergency and the present day. Excesses committed by the bureaucracy (and the police)  during the emergency have been well documented by the Shah Commission. Today, demolitions of even residential buildings, especially, but not restricted to, of the Muslim community, are carried out for apparent infractions like protesting against arbitrary executive actions or even alleged violation of anti-beef laws. There is a marked reluctance of the executive magistracy and the police to act firmly against hate speech and to strictly enforce the law when processions violate the rights of the minority community. The support of the police for the actions of vigilante groups in various states ruled by the BJP emboldens these groups to enforce their writ in matters relating to alleged “beef” consumption, “love jihad” and “conversion”. Indira Gandhi’s concept of a “committed bureaucracy” seems to have taken shape in the recent decade.

During the emergency, in the famous words of the paterfamilias of the BJP, L.K. Advani, “when the press was asked to bend, they crawled.” The situation today is more pathetic: large sections of the media genuflect before power and fail in their duty of keeping a check on executive excess. Not only that, they have taken it upon themselves to put a gloss on all actions of the government.

The Supreme Court faced its moment of truth during the Emergency in its inability to confront the denial of civil liberties by the government, best exemplified by its judgment in the ADM Jabalpur case. Today, the higher judiciary (the Supreme Court and High Courts) are facing the stonewalling by the central government on appointment of judges. Delays in hearing cases with major constitutional implications and perplexing, contradictory judgments by the judiciary at various levels has eroded the faith of the citizen in the judicial process. Unfortunately, in comparison with its 1977 predecessor, which conducted the then Lok Sabha elections admirably, the Election Commission of India has, in the recent Lok Sabha elections, been far too lenient in enforcing the Model Code of Conduct, leading to a rather bitter, acrimonious election campaign: but then those were times when, in spite of political differences, decency prevailed in public life. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has been rather chary in releasing reports on the performance of Ministries and PSUs in recent years, in marked contrast to the alacrity it displayed in the pre-2014 period.

What marks the difference between the environment of the emergency days and that of the present day are the deplorable fissures that have developed between different communities and groups in today’s society, as well as the atmosphere of bigotry and intolerance that seems to envelop society like a dark cloud. The Lok Sabha Speaker, just after his election to that august post, called for two minutes silence in remembrance of the dark memories of an emergency that is half a century old. Given the serious reservations in large sections of civil society and the political class about the infringements and restrictions on basic human rights and freedoms in the last decade and the erosion of trust and fraternity between social groups, it would have been in the fitness of things if, instead of the two minute silence, he had announced a full day discussion in the Lok Sabha to ascertain the views of members, especially those from the augmented opposition benches, about the worsening social cohesion and harmony between groups and the lessons all of us, especially those governing the country, need to imbibe from the Emergency. Unless we, as a nation, introspect on where we are headed, we will be left ruefully contemplating the words of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

1 Dec

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

Posted by vramani in elections, government, public affairs. Tagged: , , , .

(After a nine month hiatus, the Gadfly Column resumes publication today. Blogs will be published on the first and fifteenth days of every month. The blogs will also be carried on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Comments are welcome)

 

It is a reflection of the irony of our times that a blog on liberal democracy has, for its title, the words of Chairman Mao in 1957, when he said “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Over sixty years later, the jury is still out on whether this represented a genuine attempt to encourage inner party democracy or whether it was a shrewd move aimed at weeding out dissidents, followed as it was by a ruthless purge reminiscent of the Stalinist Soviet Union of the 1930s. And yet, the beauty of Indian liberal democracy since 1947 has been the space given for alternative views to flourish and for state policy to reflect the consensus arrived at after listening to opinions from all shades of the political spectrum.

Of course, there have been the occasional hiccups like the Emergency and the tendency of successive governments in India (both at the centre and in the states) to use draconian legislation to curb views interpreted by them as seditious or as a threat to public order. But Indian democracy has survived so far, despite the gloomy prognostications of many Western “Cassandras”, precisely because of its diverse population, drawn from a khichdi of languages, religions, castes and ethnicities.

I will stick out my neck by saying that caste divisions in the majority Hindu community and the formation of linguistic states postponed the slide into a unitarian state ruled by one community. Undoubtedly, there is much to be said for reforming Hindu society through the “annihilation” of caste as a marker of social privilege. But the assertion of specific caste groupings through the electoral process in different states ensured that political power did not remain with a monolith like the Congress. When the Janata party experiment failed in 1979, one of the reasons was the discomfort of various coalition partners with what they saw as the efforts of the then Jan Sangh to use the levers of powers to build up its sectarian political base. The fall of the V.P. Singh government, backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in 1990 was a foregone conclusion right from day one of that government. The Raja of Manda knew his survival as Prime Minister was contingent on withstanding the Ram Mandir Shilanyas programme and L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra. His Mandal gambit was intended to check the possibility of the consolidation of the Hindu community on the emotive Ram Janmabhoomi issue. Unfortunately for him, not only was the Congress Party not willing to back him, the “Young Turk” Chandrashekhar was only too ready to assume the mantle of Prime Minister, even if only for a little over seven months. The 1990s rise of parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), based on the support of specific castes and social groups, ensured that, for twenty five years after the Babri Masjid demolition, the party that stood to gain from its demolition was in power for just five years in Uttar Pradesh (UP).

Nehru and Rajaji were strongly opposed to the creation of linguistic states, worried as they were about the development of fissiparous tendencies in the new republic. It took the martyrdom of Potti Sriramulu to hasten the move towards linguistic states. Political developments in the 1960s seemed to vindicate their fears: the attempted imposition of Hindi provoked a backlash in Tamil Nadu (then Madras State) and the bifurcation of Punjab raised strong passions in the Punjabi Sikh population (to be unfortunately revived in the years after 1980). But the creation of linguistic states also had a positive spin off in the formation of strong regional parties, starting with the DMK in Tamil Nadu, followed by the star duo of MGR and NTR in the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and spreading like wildfire to states all across the country, from UP, Bihar, Maharashtra and Karnataka to Odisha, Assam and Bengal.

The clout of regional parties has diminished somewhat in recent years, thanks to a variety of reasons. Poor governance, especially in states like UP, has cost parties like the BSP and SP dear, while the influence of “Big Brother” BJP has reduced the scope for independent maneuvering by parties like the Biju Janata Dal and the Telugu Desam Party. With legislators apparently ready to desert the ship that won them the elections (for reasons that do not need to be explicitly spelt out here), India has entered a phase of fluid politics, where the results of an election do not guarantee which party or parties will govern a state for the next five years. “Aaya Rams” are back with a vengeance more than fifty years after 1967, though whether they will metamorphose into “Gaya Rams” over time is still a moot point.

It is in this context that the recent statement at a conference by the Prime Minister endorsing the idea of “One Nation, One Election” and stating that this is not “just an issue of deliberation, but also the need of the country” has set the cat among the pigeons. No report on his speech has clarified whether “one election” is restricted to just parliament and state elections, though that is the inference we can draw for the present. The issues of expenditures on conducting elections every now and then and the impact of frequent elections on development works can be debated. What is more crucial are the implications of such a move for the federal nature of the Indian state. A state government does not draw its legitimacy from the central government, given that India is a Union of States, affirmed by no less sanctified a document than the Constitution of India. Issues that are prominent in state elections do not often figure on the national agenda. More importantly, in the absence of any provision to recall legislators, elections offer people the only opportunity to hold their representatives accountable. There is also the issue of the lack of predictability of the tenure of a Vidhan Sabha (or, indeed, of the Lok Sabha). Loss of majority of the ruling party or dissolution of the House could trigger fresh elections well before the due date. It would be well-nigh impossible, without major constitutional changes, to manage such contingencies were simultaneous elections to become the norm. I am not holding the simplistic view that simultaneous elections necessarily lead to the same party winning at both the state and central levels. But in recent years, there has been a marked tendency to highlight issues of nationalism and patriotism, with even the armed forces being dragged into election speeches. Playing on people’s emotions could skew results in state elections, especially where large sections of the electorate, including the so-called “educated middle class” have no nuanced understanding of the issues at stake, falling prey to the barrage of fake news streamed at them by social and electronic media. There is also the very likely danger that, given the opacity of the Electoral Bonds system, one party could garner a very high proportion of the funds donated, something that recently available information seems to corroborate.

But, above all, I value the festival of democracy characterised by elections at regular intervals at different levels of government, from the gram panchayat level up to the Lok Sabha. Having conducted and supervised elections at the Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabha and municipal levels, I have observed the coming to life of people who are otherwise immersed in the mundane chores of life, whether in Motihari, Muzaffarpur or Mumbai. The right to vote is an affirmation by the citizen of her dignity as an individual. She has the unfettered right to exercise her discriminating judgment each time there is an election, whether to the Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabha or local bodies, and the full authority to question those who seek to represent her on issues, be they national, state or local. She may be, in daily life, a domestic worker, nurse or shop salesperson. But come election time, she is the power behind the throne, determining the future of those who seek to govern the country or state. It would certainly be churlish to deny her her place in the sun for brief periods at regular intervals in a five year period. Why reduce it to just one time in five years, when governments spend money on so many unnecessary items? Nor are elections the main reason why governments function so inefficiently in executing development works. The ability to handle transfers of power without bloodshed is the mark of a mature democracy, no matter what the cost is in terms of time, energy or money.