Can we find 500 good men and women to govern India?

India’s biggest threat is not from beyond our borders but from within - our staggering, growing corruption. The Commonwealth Games’ scandal sparked an anger that, through the unravelling of many other scams, has now spilled on to the streets of Indian towns and cities.

Anna Hazare’s drive has touched the heartstrings of the people, who do not understand the intricacies of the Lokpal Bill issue, but feel that the time has come to fight corruption. Whether sufficient consultation within civil society itself has taken place is another matter.

But my concern with the drive of Anna Hazare is this – his is an ‘andolan’ against an outcome, not against the root cause itself. Even when a Lokpal Bill comes through, what next? In a democracy, we need political leadership in a political system. So what does one do? We need to cut corruption at the root, in parliament itself. We need in simple terms, honest, better, wiser men and women in parliament.

Is there an alternative? Political parties take shelter under the cover of the supreme power of parliament. There are 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, apart from the two seats reserved for Anglo-Indians. Can we therefore find 500 persons, the best in the land, to whom we can safely give our country to govern?

The present system will not work because we have no alternative to the candidates that the political parties put up during elections. In 2004, the then CEC had suggested various changes to the election laws. The most important of these related to the decriminalisation of politics. As per section 8 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 only a person actually convicted by a court of law is debarred from fighting elections. However, there are numerous ‘not convicted criminals’ who obtain party tickets because the law does not prevent their candidature.

The EC has proposed that any person accused of a serious crime involving possible punishment of more than 5 years should be debarred from fighting elections. The concern that deliberate cases might be foisted on potential candidates would be taken care of by making this bar applicable only to cases booked more than 6 months ahead of the poll dates and where the competent court has framed charges against the accused, implying a judicial application of mind. The argument that a person is not guilty unless proved so is facetious; as many as 123 of our members of parliament in the Lok Sabha reportedly have a criminal background. Many of them will never be convicted in a court of law.
‘None of the above’

It is convenient for politicians to say, in media glare, vote us out of power if you are unhappy with us; they know that there is no alternative today. One view is that Rule 49 O of the Conduct of Election Rules 1961 could be used to express dissatisfaction with the abysmally poor quality of candidates generally put up by political parties. The little known rule allows a voter to formally record that he/she has decided not to vote.

One problem with this is that the secrecy of voting is not protected. But more importantly, it cannot be that we elect ‘none’ to the legislature - whoever gets the maximum votes would still be our elected representative. Therefore, we need to add a rule that if ‘none of the above’ receives the highest number of votes, a fresh election must be held, and within a certain time. The next effort must be to create a body of good men and women to fight elections and provide an alternative to corrupt parties. It is possible to create a trust – let’s call it the Jan Jamawat - which would have up to 15 trustees who are generally accepted as the best people in the country. Such a trust must reflect the views of most sections of society.

The trust would use a search-cum-selection process to determine the 500 persons who would be put up as candidates at the hustings. Funding for the trust would be through donations received from individuals.

Not many of the trust candidates may make it to parliament, certainly not in the first attempt. And certainly the process could be fraught with personal stress and even physical danger for the candidates, but then that is exactly what can be expected in a change process. Perhaps at first, only a handful, 20, 30 or 50 might be elected – their voice in parliament would be sufficient to reduce, if not prevent, malfeasance amongst our leadership.

There must be certain norms for selecting the trust’s candidates. These are to be discussed and debated, but some rudimentary guidelines can be suggested. First, that they must not stay, if elected, for more than two terms. Second, there could be some age restriction, if only to give younger people a chance to govern themselves; this need not be for the Trustees themselves, but for the candidates. Third, there should be gender sensitivity in the process of selection. Fourth, they must possess humility in eminence, and a certain ‘learning’ - secular, forward looking, sensitive; traits that most of our present day leaders lack.

A few names for the Jan Jamawat Trust come to mind – Anna Hazare, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Aruna Roy, Justice B N Srikrishna, Justice Santhosh Hegde, Arvind Kejriwal, Harish Salve, Sachin Tendulkar, Aamir Khan, J M Lyngdoh, Dr Devi Shetty, Kancha Ilaiah, Meera Sanyal. Suggestions, anyone? Will such a team work, can it work together?
(The writer is former secretary to the Government of India)