If mandate doesn’t count, are we still a democracy?
The machinations that led to the fall of the 15-month-old Kamal Nath ministry in Madhya Pradesh have dealt a body blow to the basic political morality which citizens would expect the political parties to uphold. True, the Congress has been playing its cards poorly, but that doesn’t absolve the BJP of the fraud it has been committing on our democratic system in one state after another with remarkable success. The Congress unseated the BJP, which was in power for three consecutive terms, in the 2018 Assembly polls in MP, winning 114 of 230 seats; two short of an absolute majority. The mandate was clear, and the party formed the government with the support of two BSP and one Samajwadi MLA. Two Independents also joined the bandwagon later, giving the Congress ministry a comfortable majority.
As many as 22 Congress MLAs loyal to the BJP’s new poster boy Jyotiraditya Scindia, fled to a resort in BJP-ruled Karnataka and sent in their resignations from the Assembly to the Speaker. The MLAs were incommunicado for several days, while Mr Scindia resigned from the Congress and found the BJP the best platform for him to “serve the state and nation”. The MLAs stuck to their resignations, effectively reducing the Assembly’s strength to 206 (two seats were vacant earlier). The Congress, with 94 MLAs against the BJP’s 109, was outnumbered hopelessly in the race to touch the magic number of 104, forcing the resignation of Mr Nath ahead of a no-confidence vote ordered by the Supreme Court. The Congress’ bid to seek legal help to get access to the rebel MLAs and its tactics to delay the vote fell flat as the courts refused to play ball.
Ever since it was voted to power in 2014, the BJP has been pursuing a violent idea of politics calling for a “Congress-mukt Bharat”. Given that the Congress is the main Opposition party in Parliament, and is in power in many states, the call itself is outrageous. The grand old party shows signs of fatigue with no new leadership emerging, but people have different ideas about it, as they have shown in many elections, most recently in Chhattisgarh, Haryana and Maharashtra. True, its elected members deflect to the other side for no reason other than power and pelf.
Individuals can be treacherous, ambitious, self-serving, plain greedy or morally wanting in a democracy, but when political parties with the avowed goal of service to the people betray a similar behavioural pattern, it signals a very dangerous trend. This makes a mockery of the representative form of democracy that kept our nation going over 70 years. A notorious comment attributed to a Soviet-era leader is that it’s not the people who vote that count, but it’s the people who count the votes. If a party can form a government irrespective of the popular will, and the ruling party at the Centre has developed it as a powerful tool to upset popular mandates, and is proud of it, we should stop calling ourselves a democracy. Madhya Pradesh offers no reason to think otherwise.