Democracy’s battle with money, muscle power
Navin Chawla, who served as the chief election commissioner during the 2009 general elections, analyses the challenges to the electoral process. Excerpts from his book:
WHILE I was certainly privileged to have been appointed India’s sixteenth chief election commissioner (CEC) and fortunate too that I was at the helm of affairs in conducting the democratic world’s largest election in 2009, I was also uniquely placed to see the many fault lines that were beginning to fracture our democracy. The exhilaration that came with managing an enterprise of such enormous complexity was tempered by the realization that we were not entirely masters of the game, and that there were subterranean forces that thwarted the electoral rules with growing impunity.
These negative forces had already weakened the democratic structure that I often wondered whether we could ever hope to realise the aspirations of our freedom fighters, who had sacrificed so much for independence from colonial rule. The truth, depressingly, was that foreign domination was in the process of being replaced by a homegrown oligarchy which had placed power and wealth in the hands of a few. In the process, ‘money power’, ‘muscle power’ and a partially compromised fourth estate had swept away everything that Gandhiji stood for when he said, ‘I understand democracy as something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong’.
Former UN secretary general and Nobel laureate Kofi Annan while addressing the Austrian parliament in 20141 called for an urgent public debate on the state of democracy wherein he described clean and transparent elections with integrity as the bedrock of democracy. He added that despite being the root of democracy, clean democratic elections are by no means assured. In his view, media monopolies and opaque political financing obstruct democratic practices and create unbalanced playing fields during elections, compromising electoral integrity.
In the Indian context, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee once forthrightly remarked, ‘Every legislator starts his career with a lie, with the false election return that he files.’2 He had the rare courage to give voice to a phenomenon widely recognized but very rarely spoken or written about, almost a secret shared amongst its major proponents. Vajpayee was referring to the declarations that must be filed by all candidates (after the elections) before the Commission, certifying that their campaign expenses have been within the limits prescribed by law, when, in fact, they were seriously compromised.
The cancer has now spread beyond money power, to what is referred to as muscle power. Worse, the stench of corruption of ‘paid news’ has now spread to our fourth estate as well. In the following pages I will try to analyse each of these problems and suggest remedies borne out of my experiences in the Commission.
Money power has grown into a most vexatious problem to resolve. Throughout my tenure in the Commission, it was frustrating to be taught lessons in human ingenuity in this respect. In spite of the presence of a small army— almost 2,500—of very senior officials whom we deployed as general and revenue observers (drawn from senior ranks of the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Revenue Service, no less), in the course of GE 2009, candidates and parties managed to successfully distribute money and freebies under our very noses by the most dubious means. These were often concealed or transported in the most unthinkable places: in passenger luggage, within car doors, or even hidden under the chassis of public buses.
During the course of the Karnataka assembly elections of 2008, a milk van was apprehended carrying liquor instead of milk, and an ambulance was being misused to ferry cash and freebies. Such was the extent of human inventiveness. When planes and helicopters, allegedly ferrying cash, made unscheduled landings on unauthorized helipads, we banned these until they had obtained proper coordinates so that we could then search them. We threatened pilots with the suspension of their licences. We made extensive use of flying squads and surveillance teams when we received any intelligence reports.
When monies were seized, they usually had no claimants. During GE 2009 campaign, over ₹200 crore of cash and freebies, liquor and even drugs were seized by vigilant officials. Yet, in spite of all our strenuous efforts, far larger amounts of clandestine sums would doubtless have reached their destinations, as was more recently demonstrated in a bye-election in Chennai’s RK Nagar constituency on 24 December 2017, which was necessitated by the vacancy caused by the death of J Jayalalithaa. The corruption involved was evident in April 2017 when the Commission cancelled the bye-election because the stench of bribery was rampant.
Despite the postponement and increased surveillance, the Commission failed to prevent a huge overspend, which some political commentators put at ~100 crore— and that for a bye-election once postponed for a limited constituency of Chennai. This was less a failure of the Commission and more a triumph for those forces that could devise, it was said, a technique that rewarded its voters after the election, upon the production of requisite proof.
Some analysts argue that the seeds of this malaise could inadvertently have been planted in the Constitution itself.While borrowing heavily from the UK, our Constitution framers did not take into account the fact that while the average constituency in the UK was about 375 sqkm in size with about 50,000 voters, an average Indian constituency would have over twenty times that number, at over 1.3 million voters, spread over a much larger geographical area. An MP in a Ladakh constituency would need to cover 173,266 sqkm which could take several weeks.
A single constituency in Arunachal Pradesh with an area of 40,572 sqkm would require many days of trekking to reach its far-flung outposts. To make matters more complex, each constituency, since 1971, has had to vote twice— once for parliament and once for the state assembly. Given the size and the number of voters involved, and earmarking a spend of even a few rupees per voter, the conclusion reached was that unrealistic ceiling limits had been placed from the start. During an election campaign, the average MP in India would need to depend on workers familiar with the terrain. They, in turn, would have to harness a small army of workers, most of whom would require to be paid, fed and possibly housed during the pre-election and campaign periods. Many MPs whom I have since met have complained bitterly about how unrealistic the Commission is about the real costs of a campaign.
When I was the chief election commissioner, I ran into the leader of a major political party at an airport lounge. I buttonholed him, asking why his political party chose criminal candidates. I pointed to the high figures nominated by his party for assembly elections. I named a legislator with several criminal cases pending of which at least ten were for the most heinous offences. Another had over twenty cases, again mainly for heinous offences. I asked him too whether there is any solution to this growing problem. He replied frankly, “When elections are on the horizon, our only mantra is ‘winnability’”. He added less convincingly, “If there is no election on the horizon, I will attend any meeting on this issue convened by you and sign on the dotted line”. When I put the same question to other leaders, they expressed similar views.
What I continue to find surprising is that even those political leaders who have publicly spoken against giving party tickets to those with criminal backgrounds are, nonetheless, strangely silent in the face of this growing malaise. After all, what can be stranger than the fact that 30 per cent of our lawmakers are lawbreakers? ‘Winnability’, in the final analysis, is what matters.
But why would voters wish to vote for ‘criminals’ instead of ‘clean’ candidates? Could it be that voters are not aware of their criminal antecedents?
It would perhaps be that the findings of NGOs such as ADR and NEW are confined to urban pockets and are not disseminated to the vast rural areas or small town. The more likely explanation is that the widespread mistrust of ‘the system’ which fails to deliver justice in time leads many voters to trust a criminal who can deliver ‘justice’. There could be a variety of other reasons to vote for criminal candidates: party affiliation, ties of caste, religion, region or ethnicity.
Many perceive that the institutions of state have broken down (or are outside their reach), when it comes to the settlement of their problems relating to land, water, power and even social structure. What else might help explain the fact that criminals have been known to win elections even from jail?
Witness what happened in September 2016 (widely reported in the national and local press), when the four-time MP from Siwan in Bihar was released on bail: thousands of his followers crowded into over 300 buses and expensive vehicles to form a triumphant procession as he proceeded to his home after a long term in jail. He had been convicted in an assortment of heinous cases, including that of murder.
This former MP was one of the many accused of serious crimes, who became a lawmaker and enjoyed Z-plus security cover provided by the state. A reader has simply to go to the Internet to read chapter and verse on India’s criminal legislators who in some form or the other preside over our destinies.