Vijay Kumar Gaba

Festivals are quintessential to the idea of India. No one can imagine India excluding the hundreds of festivals we celebrate. There is hardly any day on the calendar that is not marked with a religious observance or a social celebration. As a community we are so addicted to festivities that we even celebrate sporting events as festivals. Not surprising, political events like elections, local level political appointments, conventions of political parties, etc. are also celebrated as major festivals in India.

The largest festival in the world, Indian general election, is scheduled to be held in about one year from now. All political parties, like the troops participating in the annual carnival in Brazil, have already started preparing for the quinquennial event. The potential 950million voters are also looking forward to it; though one third of them may actually not bother to exercise their franchise.

In most major democracies in the world, the incumbent leadership and/or party seeks reelection on the basis of its performance in the current term and proposed agenda for the prospective term. However, in India the elections are mostly about persons rather than policies and programs. The caste and religion of the candidate is assigned more importance than their views on socio-economic policies; commitment to political ideology; or past performance.

There are many examples of one person contesting and winning as candidate of political parties subscribing to completely opposite socio-political ideologies. There is no limit on the number of times a person can represent a constituency (or different constituencies) in the parliament. There are numerous examples of candidates repeatedly winning from the same constituency despite dismal past performance and inadequate agenda for the future. In fact, many notorious candidates facing serious criminal charges like murder, rape, dacoity, kidnapping etc. not only get repeated nomination; they get elected with overwhelming majority.

In my recent trips to the hinterlands and various large cities, I discussed the current political scenario with people from various sections of the society. There appears to be unanimity on the point of the quality of politicians. Everyone appears convinced that the quality of politicians in India has deteriorated over the past 3 decades. Senior citizens recall that politicians in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were highly educated and held impeccable character. The quality started deteriorating in the late 1980s and the rate of decline accelerated sharply from the 1990s.

Surprisingly, the decline in the quality of Indian politics and politicians coincided with the structural improvement in the Indian economy. The socio-economic parameters like growth rate, occupational structure, urbanization, globalization, literacy rate, access and connectivity (roads, media, telephony, TV, internet etc.), higher education, gender equality, etc., have indubitably improved materially in the past three decades. The worst part is that the primary driver of popular mandate is no longer socio-economic upliftment; but the regressive agenda of aggressive social divide.

The points to ponder therefore are: (i) Why the empowered, enabled and enriched citizens are not aspiring for a cleaner, ethical and progressive political system; and (ii) Does socio-economic growth and development in India have any correlation with the political set up in India?

….to continue