JOIN USThe strangling of democracy
The media commentaries around the recent political turns in Madhya Pradesh (MP) offer a sense for the trends in the shaping of India’s political culture.
Jyotiraditya Scindia quit the Congress to join the BJP and became the latter’s Rajya Sabha nominee from MP soon thereafter. The 19 Congress MLAs in MP loyal to him were flown down to Bengaluru in chartered flights. The moves have become familiar. At the time of the collapse of the coalition government in Karnataka last year, for instance, the defecting MLAs from Congress and JD(S) had been flown to Maharashtra where the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government was in power.
When Scindia’s exit from the Congress party seemed imminent, the media commentators chose to stay fixated on the political moves he might make next: “He is likely to join BJP”; “He will become a Rajya Sabha member and be rewarded with a ministerial berth in the Union Cabinet”, and so on. And they also targeted the Congress alongside for not keeping its house in order and disallowing “talented leaders” to “rise” within the party. The undesirable political and moral implications of the attempt to bring down elected governments rarely figured among their concerns. Anticipating similar political developments in Rajasthan, a reporter of an English television channel even observed enthusiastically, “All arrangements have been made for the comfortable stay of the rebel Congress MLAs.”
How do you feel about your representatives shifting to another party? None of the TV channels bothered to pose this question to the voters from the constituencies of the defecting legislators. The new government in MP had been elected after three successive terms of a BJP government. The anti-incumbent vote that had sought to see another party in power in the new term will have meant nothing if the Congress government now loses the majority and makes way for the BJP to be back in power in MP.
The goings-on in MP are now becoming frighteningly familiar, but we cannot afford to let them be seen as legitimate politics. Euphemistic phrases like “Operation Kamala” and “resort politics,” which have routinely surfaced in public discussions in the wake of several “mass defections” of legislators seen in recent years to bring down freshly elected governments, threaten to do just that. They rationalize it as inevitable power games. They hide the wrongness of it all. The sole focus on strategy and benefits has nearly reduced representative politics to a procedural formality.
The destabilizing of elected governments by a party just voted out of power in recent years has often happened within the framework of existing rules, but such efforts nevertheless have to be seen as immoral practice. If voters have rejected a political party in an election, the latter’s response cannot be: “Your wishes don’t matter. We will be back in power at the earliest.” Such an attitude is, of course, insulting towards the voters. It also corrodes their faith in electoral democracy. The electorate can even turn cynical and lose hope, with dire consequences for the future of India’s democracy.
Normalizing the engineering of defections as legitimate political strategy also hurts the multi-party system, a foundational feature of India’s federal polity. The smaller regional parties, for instance, become vulnerable vis-à-vis the national parties with vastly greater resources at their command. The adverse implications for the future of regional cultural and political aspirations can also be imagined.
The anti-defection law, of course, needs to be strengthened and every other possible legal route explored to curb the practice of manipulating political defections, but the matter is fundamentally less about the legal framework and more about a genuine commitment to the spirit of democracy. The voters -- irrespective of the political party they support -- should want political parties to abide by the latter. Otherwise, they remain irresponsible witnesses to the strangling of democracy in the country.