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24 September 2004
Of the people, for the people and by the people
Over the last three months of summer, I have become much more aware of and increasingly curious about the subjects of politics, governance and democracy. This has been on account of the recent elections in India, the upcoming elections in the United States, my experiences during the recent trip back to India, exposure to the wide wide world of political journalism, del.icio.us and finally my own increased appetite to be in stride with the happenings-on around me. Much of what I learnt was a revision of history and also a broadening of perspectives but mostly a sound platform that has shaped up my personal flavour of a political ideology.India and the United States being amongst the largest democracies in the world today have many common principles that guide their destinies as nations. This is not totally surprising since the Indian constitution borrows amongst other things, its ideas of federalism and individual rights from the US constitution, its amendments and the Bill of Rights. However, it was deemed necessary to tune these ideas to fit the requirements of a country that now had a newly forged national identity. The most striking difference in today's context is that of the notion of representative democracy. Whereas the U.S. follows a presidential system and an indirect election, India follows the parliamentary system and direct election. Each of the fifty states in the United States has two seats reserved in the Senate and a number of representatives in the House of Representatives that is proportional to the state's population. These in totality form the electoral college. The president is elected based on the number of votes won in the electoral college but the electoral college itself plays directly in each state. Therefore, each state votes for the two candidates and depending on who has the most votes, all the votes of the state's share go towards him. At least, this is true in almost all states barring a few like Maine and possibly Colorado soon, where the electoral college share is split in proportion to the votes received. The decision to allow states to decide how each would like its share of the presidential pie expressed was in itself an amendment to the U.S. constitution that came about only a few decades ago but is a strong assertion of the federalist nature of the political system in the country.
In contrast, in India the electoral college is reserved only for the nominal purpose of voting for the president and for voting for the members of the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House). States within India contribute seats in the parliament consisting of the Lok Sabha (the Lower House) and the Rajya Sabha in proportion to their respective populations. The party with the most number of seats in the Lower House stakes its claim to form the executive branch. And therein lies the catch. At this point it becomes necessary to compare the formation of states in the United States and India. In the former's case, more than two hundred years ago the country was only a loose union of thirteen colonies founded and settled in by the early Protestant pilgrims. Soon after independence was won from the British, the young nation embarked upon a massive westward expansion. While most of the land was usurped by fighting and vanquishing the native occupants, some provinces were acquired by virtue of purchase (the Louisiana Sale). Broadly, the states formed as chronological artefacts of the expansion drive. Little wonder then that the largest states were and continue to be beyond the Mississippi. Contrast this with how the states were formed in a nascent India immediately after independence. India too was formerly a loose aggregation of provinces and territories with each shaping within its conclave an independent and distinct culture that comprised a language, religious practices, music and dance forms, class systems and occupational hierarchies. Naturally the only plausible parameter that would determine any demarcation of inland borders (and demarcation was imperative for a country with the geographical magnitude such as India's) was language. And so it was that the Travancore province evolved into Kerala, Mysore into Karnataka, Madras into Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad into Andhra Pradesh and so on. In the first few years, as India began to experiment with socialism and government-controlled enterprise this structure was harmless and must have in fact contributed to its cultural diversity. What was not envisioned however was that mere linguistic compartmentalisation would never square off well with the parliamentary system and direct elections. This has never been more apparent than in the last fifteen years whence local regional parties have begun to assume formidable national importance while they serve only a sporadic and limited sphere of vested interests. The recently concluded elections amplify this shortcoming -- the Left bloc comprising of the Communist Party of India (CPI), CPI-Marxist, the Forward Bloc etc. won sixty seats in the Lower House all or most of them in an already left-listing West Bengal full of pretentious intellectuals with bloated egos and myopic ideals and surprisingly Kerala but that was enough, and I am forced to quote myself, to hold the country to ransom. Over the years, states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have all contributed immensely to the national demographic but little else to the national purse and yet the definition of democracy seems to favour them so much so that the Left, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Samajwadi Party form oligarchic power-centres who ride to power within their states having mastered the art and science of vote-winning, electioneering and empty promises and subsequently discard their electorate to eye, covet and control the national agenda.
It is a tragedy to realise that federalism as a feature of democracy has failed in a curiously contrarian manner in India -- while elsewhere and especially in the United States it is the states' governance and influence being trampled upon, in India it is the entire nation's. How else are we to explain the presence of someone as the Railway minister while his wife is the Chief Minister of the state he represents, let alone questioning the very validity of him having assumed that position in spite of being chargesheeted by the country's crime bureau and facing a host of other criminal charges? How else can we rationalise the unwanted thrust of a foolish and dangerous ideology being forcibly imposed on a nation of a billion when only a fraction supports its principles and leaders in one nook of the country? How did we once let a local henchman wanted for murder and election violence become the Defence minister?
