For forms of elections let fools contest
PMan is nasty, society is chaotic and politics is nothing but a struggle for power. What turns disorder into order is democracy complete with the rule of law and a bill of rights, although it is said democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Democracy is nothing without universal adult franchise or elections. But like all forms of democracy, all forms of elections are fraught with flaws. Hence the never-ending debate over the best form of elections -- whether it is the first-past-thepost system or the proportional representation system or a mix of the two in various ratios. For forms of elections let fools contest, whatever is best administered is best.
If this is the criterion, India's election machinery is amazing and those who administer the elections stand out for their commitment and integrity. India's elections may not have tourism value like the Taj Mahal, although
moves are now encils, lead and coloured, a drawing book, and a storybook about a family of penguins - these were the trophies we clutched to our chest one bright morning, half a century ago, as we marched out of The Corner Bookshop, a cosy street-corner store a few teetering steps from St. Michael's Church, Polwatte, down a secluded inner street in Kollupitiya.
The book and the artwork materials were gifts from two aunts, Agnes Spittel and Lottie Jansz, sisters who overlooked and gently directed the growing up years of Older Brother, Younger Brother and self. Great-aunts, great teachers, great persons altogether - the two elderly ladies were a win-win combination that would bless and shower benefits on our formative years through the '50s and '60s.
The time would have been April, around Easter, in the mid-Fifties. We know it was Easter because of memory fragments of chocolate eggs, moss jelly eggs, and penguin eggs. That sunny morning, the Church-of-England aunts would have first taken us to see their church, St. Michael's, and then chaperoned us to the bookshop round the corner.
Our second visit to The Corner Bookshop came more than half a century later. The bookshop had recently changed tone and hands. It was not a Christian store any more; the original sold Bibles and Christian literature, stationery and children's books. The new owners specialised in textbooks and school stationery, but The Corner Bookshop legend, picked out in bits of brick above the entrance, had been preserved.
The aunts would have told us to choose a book, and we reached out for penguins. With children, as with many adults, the book cover was the deciding factor. The large-format hardback had a glossy bluered-white-black cover, and was big on an unfamiliar branch of ornithology. There was another curious, visually teasing feature about the cover, which we will come to later.
On getting back to the aunts' home, at No. 4, Police Park Terrace, we spread out our goodies on the white-painted rattan-weave table in the middle of the sitting room, and Agnes made us sit next to her on the green Rexine-covered sofa. She opened the book and started reading. It was the story of a day in the life of a penguin family. The bird clan, like ours, spanned three generations - children, parents, grandparents, and brothers and sisters. There was even an Aunt Bessie; we too had an Aunt Bessie underway to promote election tourism. Yet they can easily be described as one of the world's wonders. How the Elections Commission of India (ECI) conducts elections offers valuable lessons to politicians and political science students, academics and activists, democracy lovers and dictators, lawmakers and lawbreakers, and, above all, to elections commissioners worldwide and their staff.
All systems go
Described by many observers as The Greatest Show on Earth, India's elections mean all systems go: Even bulls, mules, camels and elephants and trains, buses, tractors and aircraft are brought into service when the world's largest democracy with a voting population of more than 850 million goes to poll. Also put into service are more than 1.4 million electronic voting machines, 11 million polls staff, nearly 850,000 polling stations countrywide, 2.5 million security personnel, nearly 150,000 observers and 75,000 videographers carrying some 40,000 digital cameras. All this is part of the gigantic effort by the ECI to ensure that the people's right to elect their government is upheld.
It is indeed a title befitting the subject matter when S.Y. Quraishi, easily one of India's most remarkable Elections Commissioners, calls his book "An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election" - which is the subject of this review.
I have little doubt that readers would thank him for producing a brilliant book in simple yet scholarly language and helping them to marvel at the Himalayan task — the working of India's elections machinery — and the challenges the ECI and its staff encounter. Theirs is an allout war to ensure that every voter exercises his or her franchise and that every vote is counted. They plan and war-game moves to defeat attempts by insurgents and Naxalites in troubled regions to disrupt the elections -- and also attempts by moneyed, corrupt and power-hungry politicians to distort the will of the people.
Mr. Quraishi's book, an insider's account, is a must-read for Sri Lankans especially at a time when the country is set on a good-governance mode and when moves are underway to provide constitu- (Elizabeth Spittel-Walbeoff), who lived in Kandy, in a hilltop house overlooking the old elephant bathing spot on the Mahaveli, where the river flowed past Katugastota.
In our unorganised head, elephants and penguins were awkwardly crossing paths and politely colliding. A steamy river gurgled with crocodiles on the other side of a snowscape dotted with polar bears. Our sense of the big world was flat and inclusive. The aunts, who supervised our progress in Writing, Reading, Geography, History, Sinhala and Numbers, would in due course orient us so we knew our Tropics from our Antarctics.
The story centred on a penguin family day out on a frozen lake. The younger penguins go skating, while Father Penguin cuts a hole in the ice to fish for food in the freezing black water beneath. The youngest penguin skates into the hole and is rescued with much wing-flapping excitement. The happy ending shows a cosy family gathered under an ice-vaulted roof in a spacious up-market igloo. The penguins have a big laugh about the day's adventure as they tuck into a meal of fried Arctic fish.
Looking back on that shiny, translucent, ice-cube of a memory, of a former childhood self stepping out of a corner bookshop, we note a symbol in the child's hand, a sign of things to come. Books to come. In time, the penguins of that storybook would metamorphose and multiply into penguin tional guarantees to the independence of the Elections Commission through the 19th Amendment. The people of Sri Lanka have witnessed how helpless our elections commissioners have been in carrying out their duties. Often our elections commissioners had or are alleged to have succumbed to pressure from powerful politicians of the party in power. Perhaps the exception is the incumbent Elections Commissioner, Mahinda Deshapriya, who with limited powers and resources withstood political pressure and ensured a relatively fair election that changed the history of this country. The cause for Mr. Deshapriya's triumph, perhaps, lies in his commitment to ensure that the will of the people was not thwarted by the scheming of dishonest politicians. He emerged like his counterparts in India -- the Quraishis and the T.N. Sheshans. Incidentally, Mr. Quraishi, who was India's Chief Elections Commissioner from 2006 to 2012, was in Sri Lanka during the January 8 election as head of the Asian Elections Authorities on a monitoring mission.
Running through his 448-page book and binding the chapters and ideas together is the good intention with which India's elections commissioners work as the custodians of democracy and the guardians of the sovereignty of the people. Its chapters deal with the evolution of the good intention - the process of learning from mistakes, the nuts and bolts of electoral operations to money power and the role of the media, and the role of the youth, to name a few topics. Every chapter gives readers a wealth of knowledge not only about elections but many aspects of polit- mutants and variants, and other birds of a literary feather.
Two or three years on, the reading habit established, the child had started to collect and expropriate larger, fatter Penguins, those of the Bigger Book World, as well as book birds and bird books of other species, such as Puffins and Pelicans.
The precocious pre-teen pounced on any Penguin his meddlesome hands could find. The birds came in varying colours. The white-chested Penguins with dark Green wings were Detective stories, with titles like "Murder on the Orient Express", "The Case of the Crooked Candle," and "The Incredulity of Father Brown." The birds with Red wings waved Travel titles like "Sea and Sardinia," "Brazilian Adventure," and "Siren Land." The Blue-winged were academic birds, and came bearing titles like "What Happened in History," "Microbes by the Million," and "Totem and Taboo." The Orange-winged were Novels, with adult themes and titles like "Loving", "Love in a Cold Climate," "Love in the Haystacks," "Love and Mr. Lewisham," "Sons and Lovers," and "By Love ical life from voter behaviour to political skullduggery, from ancient forms of Indian democracy — the Buddha's discourse and the tenth century Tamil Nadu democracy — to modern reforms. There are interesting anecdotes and tidbits aplenty. They together with other useful techniques remove reader fatigue associated with books on serious subjects.
But his is a book that makes one read, think and act. The book, which tells the reader many things about the first Indian general election in 1951-52, the last general election in 2014 and many polls before and in between, notes that most politicians are thieves but asks: "Can democracy exist without politicians?" This is where the ECI steps in to conduct a free and fair election, the credibility of which rests on four pillars — the independence or the fearlessness of the elections commission (leaving no room for incumbency advantage), transparency, neutrality and professionalism.
Mr. Quraishi's erudite analysis identifies four major trends in Indian politics - the decline of a dominant pan-national party, the emergence of regional parties in a national role, multi-party coalition politics and the ethnicisation of political culture with each party claiming and surviving on sectarian support. He also notes the increasingly assertive role being played by civil society in strengthening India's democracy.
Money politics and media
The book deals extensively with the ECI's battles to deal with the role of money in subverting elections. Targeted are not only power-hungry politicians — Possessed."
These marvellous "birds" were caged, read in secret, and released a week or two later - back to whoever was compelled to hand them over. The majority of the "bird" owners were music students, who had come to our home to learn to play the violin. Whatever books they carried in order to while away the time till it was their turn for a music lesson were wrested, like precious orc eggs, from their grasp. The students are now married professionals, most of them grandparents. Some are no more.
We remember, with deep reader gratitude, those many reluctant and submissive book sharers, including Nimalka (née Wijetillake), who introduced us to Erle Stanley Gardner; Rohini (née Wijekoon), whose mother was "terrified" of crime stories with "murderous" covers; the sisters S. and S. (née Gunasekera); Dawn Potger; Anula (née Aluvihare); the de Fonseka sisters; Christine Fernando; Isaac Kulendran, and tsunami victim, the late Beulah Ambrose (née Solomon), who lent us "Wuthering Heights." There were others.
Come to think of it, there were no but also Corporate India. An electoral democracy cannot function without political finance, which comes with strings attached and quid-pro-quo deals. Money power at elections makes voters a commodity, undermining the essence of democracy. The unscrupulous politician knows how to bypass laws and heap freebies on the voter. While more regulation is called for, civil society action can again play a major role to defeat money power. The chapter on 'Engaging Youth', to a great extent, offers a solution to the problem of money in politics. This chapter relates the story of a university student who travelled more than 5,500 kms - 3,200 of this distance on foot -- to empower India's poverty-stricken voters. Abdul Mujeeb Khan asks them what things are like. They tell him life is difficult and the government is not doing enough for them. He then asks how they usually choose who they are going to vote for. Most times, the answer is whichever candidate gives them the largest handout, money, or liquor. Mujeeb Khan then asks: "If you vote for somebody because of the money he pays you, then do you really expect the politician to not make money in return? After all, he has to recoup his investment."
The chapter on the media makes interesting reading and Mr. Quraishi's views on regulation of the media during election time are relevant to Sri Lanka since the 19th Amendment provisions on the Elections Commissioner's powers to appoint a competent authority to govern 'unruly' media organisations have created some controversy.
"Whereas much of the mass media in India covered the elections in a non-partisan manner, there were sections that compromised their independence for commercial interests. …. We in the Commission were clear that while there should be no move to curtail the freedom and independence of the media, and that self-regulation is ideally the best form of regulation, effective steps to prevent the misuse of the media by vested interests are indeed required," he says.
He also sees the media as the eyes and ears of the ECI during elections time and the foot soldiers of the commission have been told to take every report in the media seriously and follow them up with necessary action.
Adding value to the book is the foreword written by Gopalkrishna Gandhi. He says Quraishi, a development thinker, "has not just given us information and knowledge, but confidence and pride."
When reading this book, a tale of courage and hope, a Sri Lankan reader may ask: "When will we see systems that will make us proud again." Penguins, no paperbacks, in the home of Agnes Spittel and Lottie Jansz. Their library contained only hardbacks, books from their teaching careers, and leatherbound volumes from the library of Lottie's husband, the linguist and clergyman Paul Lucien Jansz. Even the detective stories were hardbacks, Collins Crime Club first editions.
Entering a book, hardback or soft, hardboiled or not, is like locking yourself in a private room. Once in, you close the door. Bolt it, lock it. You ignore knocks on the door, even taps on the windowpane.
To switch metaphor, you are like an ostrich with its head in the sand, oblivious of the world around you, assuming no one can see you.
Ostriches are desert birds. Penguins are birds of a frozen world. Over time, we learned to sort out our ostriches, penguins, pelicans and puffins, the real things, in our History and Geography classes with the two Aunts.
It has to be inserted here, better late than never, that Agnes and Lottie were the two most wonderful aunts in the world. You would not find two such aunts if you went searching from the North Pole to the South. They taught us to count and to read; they trained us to say "thank you" when someone performed a favour, showed a kindness; they reminded us to list our blessings; they pointed out that the servants in our homes were there only because we had the advantage, and that in a parallel world, where roles were reversed, we would be serving them in their homes, so consider yourself lucky.
That penguin book the aunts gave us circa 1956 had a glassy cover that played a trick on the eye. The red words of the title rested on the smooth deep blue of an Arctic sky. When you picked up the book, the red words started to slide, ever so slightly, over the viscous blue. The red appeared to shift a fraction. When the cover was tilted, the red slid in another direction, as if the words were glissading, but stopping one step later. The red and the blue seemed to have a little arrangement, an optical gimmick, between them. We would later see this visual shuffle happen in other blue-red contexts.
The world around us is all about colour, and the play of colours; about people and things, and the play between things and people.
Books are the best of all things, of the world's magic and tricks, with their bewitching covers and the rest of it.