India’s elections are always exciting, even in those constituencies where the results are predictable. There can always be an element of surprise. In a multi-party system with many independents in the fray, who knows who will cut whose votes to what extent and who will benefit in the process to emerge victorious?
These and many other uncertainties are the stuff on which fierce election debates are created from chaupal and chowk to newspaper pages and TV channels. We’ll be seeing all this in this election season too, but it must be admitted that the spectacle of this dance of democracy has been diminished at least to some extent by recent events.
One of these relates to the arrest of Hemant Soren, the Chief Minister till recently of Jharkhand, followed by the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal, the Chief Minister of Delhi, a short while before elections started. Now no one can argue that holding high office gives immunity from charges of corruption and the courts will decide how true and serious these charges are. But many argue the arrests just before elections should have been avoided. These allegations have been around for quite some time, and if the legal processes over them had already lingered for some time, they could have continued time till after the elections.
After all, there is hardly any precedence in India of such electioneve arrests of chief ministers. The second aspect relates to the freezing of some bank accounts of the Congress Party and tax penalties which will adversely affect the availability of adequate funds for its election campaign. While the authorities have promised no coercive action until after the polls, and courts will ultimately decide the contested issues, what many people feel uneasy about is this action taking place just before elections.
People want anyone guilty to be punished, but they do not want anything that smells of opposition parties being unfairly targeted just before elections. People want entirely fair elections with a level playing field, something that the world’s largest democracy clearly deserves. People are also apprehensive regarding the excessive use of funds to ‘facilitate’ the shifting of loyalties of several opposition politicians to the ruling party in recent times. All governments have an element of corruption. In certain conditions, corruption of some gets exaggerated importance, while corruption of others is pushed under the carpet and downplayed. While Mr. Kejriwal and his colleagues allege that the corruption charges against then are not true, they too had used highly exaggerated charges to give the Manmohan Singh government at the national level and the Sheila Dikshit government in Delhi a very bad name. Many of the corruption charges they highlighted in their campaign were later proved to be false or exaggerated.
The results, particularly for the elderly Sheila Dikshit, who had on the whole provided reasonably good governance to Delhi for a long time (while also making some mistakes), were tragic. Mr. Kejriwal had also pitched the Lokpal ombudsman as a magic bullet solution for corruption, neglecting the more comprehensive solutions offered by his former senior colleagues in social movements. An atmosphere was built up in which it was made to appear that if this allpowerful ombudsman, itself an undemocratic concept, was not implemented exactly as recommended the heavens would fall, but then after political aims were achieved this was forgotten all too conveniently. So the lesson here is not just for the BJP but also for some of the opposition parties to never use corruption in an opportunistic way, and instead go strictly by the available evidence.
Corruption is certainly extremely harmful for the country, but its misuse as a political weapon can also be extremely harmful. Much discussed research on the downfall of important and popular leaders in Brazil in the recent past has revealed that they were largely innocent but false allegations against them were used in an unethical way by powerful forces in the country which in turn were supported by even more powerful allies in Western countries. This also brings us to the interesting question of which side the Western countries are likely to favour in India in the current election season.
Generally, their tendency has been to support right-wing forces but the reality is that these powerful countries tend to pursue their strategic and political interests while somehow justifying this in the name of defending human rights, for which the West has criticized the present government. The West’s impatience with the Modi government is that it has not followed the West in terms of important strategic matters considered crucial by them. To give just one example, India did not follow the Western lead in sanctions against Russia and maintained its neutrality in the Ukraine conflict, very rightly so. In the process India could also get a lot of oil and gas at cheap rates from Russia, much to the envy as well as indignation of some European countries who find themselves in a very difficult situation by following sanctions.
Besides, while India is and will remain largely a friend of the Western world regardless of the government it chooses, the West frequently wants its important friends not to have very strong leaders; they prefer to deal with a more fragmented polity and weaker, more pliable leaders. Overall, the democratic sanctity of the election process should be protected by the government as well as by the Election Commission. The opposition should get a fair and level playing field. The government should also take care to avoid any undue outside interference in the elections. While the Election Commission is there to ensure that electoral discourse is suitably disciplined, at the same time all political parties should also issue strict instructions to their supporters and members regarding this.
(The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071.)