Representative Democracy in India

Winston Churchill had once commented about democracy being the worst form of government, except for those that have been tried so far. This view has been reiterated by Amartya Sen, according to whom democracy remains the only form of government that commands global respect.

The forms of State and its institutions can be traced back to ancient Greece with city-states as the fundamental political units. Plato had advocated the rule of a single philosopher ruler with almost unlimited powers (subject only to a restriction by the 'law of the land' or the constitution). Aristotle (Plato's disciple) found this idea impracticable as too much power vested in the hands of a single man can cause the decay of a polity, howsoever wise the man might be ('man' has been italicized because Greece was a strongly patriarchal society and only adult able-bodied males fulfilling the criteria laid down in Plato's education system were thought fit to become philosopher rulers). This is because of the vulnerability of human nature/the corrupting influence of power. Aristotle proposed democracy as an alternative form of government. The word democracy has its origins in demos (people) and -cracy (rule), i.e., rule by the people. Later on, when the medieval period of Church-supremacy in Europe was about to end, Niccolo Machiavelli (in his book Prince) suggested democracy as the desirable form of government if people are virtuous (however, his assumption about human nature was that most people aren't virtuous, and thus,  authoritarian rule is the best one). The first democratic nation-state in the world emerged (the USA) after the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln described democracy as the government of the people, by the people, for the people. Thereafter, other countries followed suit and by-and-by, democracy came to be recognized as a better form of government. According to Samuel P. Huntington, democracy visited the countries of the world in waves interspersed with reverse waves. Democracy came to symbolize the general will of the people (a term, which had been proposed earlier by Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

The Preamble to the Constitution of India describes India as a democratic republic (a country where the Head of the State—e.g., the President in India—is not a hereditary one/monarch but is an elected one; alternatively, where the government has representatives from the public). Thus, the Indian democracy is not a direct democracy (which is ruled almost directly by the people) but a representative democracy—people elect their representatives to the legislatures and the executive (the government) is formed from amongst those very legislators (in this, India has adopted the Westminster model or the Cabinet Model of government, borrowed from Britain).

In India, elections are held using the majoritarian system or First Past The Post (FPTP) system in each of the parliamentary as well as state legislative constituencies (now single-member constituencies). The candidate who secures the largest number of votes in a constituency is declared as the winner for a seat in the respective legislature. According to the first Chief Election Commissioner of India (Sukumar Sen) the FPTP system was suited to the needs of India after independence. Less than a quarter of the Indians were literate and the FPTP system was simple to explain to the first-time or illiterate voters.

The electoral defeat of the Congress and the victory of the loose Janata Party coalition after the national emergency period (1975-77) showed that the Indian voters are well-aware of the values associated with a democracy (e.g., freedom of speech and expression, freedom of the press). Nevertheless, the comeback of the Congress party at the central government in 1979 elections showed that the Indian electorate equally deplores unstable or temporary governments at the centre. 1989 onwards, successive governments at the centre have been coalition governments, and no single political party has been able to secure an absolute (50 per cent seats plus one) majority required for forming the government on its own.

The present state of politics in India is a mixed-lot. Whereas the procedural (theoretical) aspect of the democracy (i.e., free and fair elections) has largely been successful, the substantive (practical) aspect has been a cause of concern. The problems in the substantive aspect somehow leads one to question the democratic character of polity in India—whether India is still a democracy or a "deformed polyarchy". Deformed polyarchy signifies that the country has many persons or groups as power-centres. However, decision-making power for the most important tasks in the country still lies with a few elite persons or groups out of all these power-centres. Over the years, it has been observed that while the rural and poor voters have been more assertive in exercising their political franchise, the middle-class voter participation has been somewhat declining. This lackadaisical attitude of the middle-class seems to point towards an electoral fatigue or despair as to the nature of representative politics in India. Furthermore, political parties try to amass the votes of the poor people, illiterate sections among the rural people by announcing populist measures just before the elections. This particular section of the voters, which a scholar has described as "political society", has got very limited bargaining power with the government once the election-fever is over.

Compounding these problems is the use of black money for election campaigning. Critics point out that the lack of a election campaign-related expenditure limit for political parties is somewhere linked to the use of such money. Also, one of the uses of movie-actors' campaigning for political parties is to gather votes through appealing to the popular-sentiment. It is not a taboo for movie actors or famous personalities to contest elections and/or campaign for candidates—after all, democracy implies equality in political affairs. Still, questions can be raised as to their previous experience of social work.

A look at the statistics related to the MPs of the 15th Lok Sabha (given by Association for Democratic Reforms) revealed that over half of them owned assets worth crores of rupees. If one goes by the statistics of Institute of Applied Manpower Research, then the bottom 60 per cent of the Indian households own a mere 13 per cent of the country's assets, whereas a substantial fraction of the country's assets are owned by the country's elite. If these two facts are taken together, one doesn't need to be a genius to understand the level of representation of the aam aadmis (common people) in the representative politics in India. There are exceptions to this—but then they are exceptions.

In 2013, the Central Information Commission (CIC) had opined that a few political parties in India are substantially funded by the public. Thus, they should also be under the ambit of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. This opinion elicited strong disapproval by these aggrieved parties and now the bill seeking to reverse this dictum by the CIC is lying before a parliamentary standing committee. The political parties have their own concerns regarding this—according to them, this would severely interfere with their independent functioning, which does require secrecy. What is remarkable, though, is the consensus which was achieved among the parties—in a short span of time—whereas the institution of Lokpal (the national ombudsman) took so long to be given a statutory recognition. At present, political parties need not disclose the details of donations received by them that are below 20,000 rupees. There has been a demand for the parties to proactively disclose all the donation amounts, even if they are seemingly meager. This would ensure a complete transparency in funding. Further, more than one-third of the newly-elected MPs of the 16th Lok Sabha have criminal charges pending against them.

The Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and the Urban Local Bodies (covered respectively under the 73rd and the 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts)—the third-tier of government in India—have a mandate of reserving 33 per cent of the seats in their various sub-levels for women. It is usually seen that the women in these positions are just dummy candidates behind whom the real candidate is their husband or one of their close male relatives. Further, the women in these institutions seem to come only from an elite family background or a part of "dynastic politics". The representation of women in the Parliament and in the State Legislatures has been dismal till date. This issue manifests itself in the low ranking of India in terms of the Gender Inequality Index (GII) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report (HDR). Then, there is to be an adequate representation of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in the legislative bodies to ensure that their problems in the society are listened to and that curative action is taken on them.

Even though the polity of South Korea and that of India may be substantially different, at least at the surface level (disregarding the domestic politics of South Korea) the Prime Minister of South Korea has shown a great level of professionalism by resigning from his post after the recent ferry mishap. Could this be expected of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister in reaction to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots (for which even the Supreme Court has expressed strong disapproval regarding the conduct of the state government)?

Many political leaders in India seem to have mastered the art of rhetoric—which becomes evident by the incomplete representation of the economic and/or historical facts by the leaders in their campaign speeches. Adding to the woes is the phenomenon of hate speeches and seditious statements by leaders. The ECI's Model Code of Conduct doesn't have a legislative backing and therefore, harsh actions cannot be taken by the commission. Furthermore, electoral reforms take a long time to be implemented. Thus, there are some steps that can ensure that political parties field better candidates in constituencies. The critics of FPTP system have contended (rightly) that such a system can make a candidate win a Lok Sabha or a State Legislative Assembly seat even when a majority (more than 50 per cent) of the voters from that constituency have not voted in favour of that candidate. This becomes possible due to the candidate's securing the largest absolute number of votes.

•      A Proportional Representation system would be a much better alternative  (compounded by an open-list system—a system where the list of candidates to be fielded by a political party is itself chosen by the people). In this system, political parties get seats in legislature in proportion to the fraction of votes that they have secured. Critics of this system opine that this will lead to unstable coalition governments at the centre. However, considering the history of electoral politics since 1989 (an era of coalition governments), the system seems to be a feasible  one. The only loophole seems to be whether this system can be swiftly accepted by the illiterate fraction of the electorate (26 per cent of Indians, as per Census 2011, are still illiterate) or not.

•      Another possible option can be to follow the methods of Referendum and Recall (used in Switzerland, which is considered as the polity closest to direct democracy). In this, the people decide important issues through referendum (voting by the people themselves). They also have the option to call back their representative from a legislature (recall) if he/she is not upto their standards. This, however, can be economically unviable, considering the large geographical extent of India and the large population of India's constituencies as compared to Switzerland.

•      A third approach would be to keep following the present FPTP system, but to bring changes in it. The Supreme Court had issued directions to the ECI to introduce a None Of The Above (NOTA) button in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). There has been very less use of this provision, though, in the 2014 general elections. However, such an option does not give the voters to express disapproval at individual candidates fielded by the political parties. Adjacent to the standard voting button present against the name of a candidate on the EVMs, the ECI can get placed red-coloured buttons for the voters to censure a candidate. The voters may be given an option to cast their vote in favour of a single candidate (positive-vote) or hit the NOTA and express as many censure-votes as they like. Further, the censure votes against a candidate's name may be counted to get an idea about the candidate's image. If the censure votes against a candidate exceed the number of votes secured by him/her, then action can be taken (e.g., cancellation of candidature, or the censure-votes can be assigned a fraction of a negative-vote). The benefit of this approach is that the political parties will be compelled to field honest and hard-working candidates for a constituency. This approach, however, can face two shortcomings. First, there can be groups of people who can falsely press the censure button to taint the image of a candidate. Second, though introduction of this button on the EVMs may be economically viable, the whole election process will be more time-consuming and so, expensive. The illiterate voters may take a long time to adapt themselves to this method. Further, the delays and expenses will be compounded for the polling booths where electoral malpractices are reported and subsequently re-polls are ordered by the ECI.

It remains to be seen how much the people are willing to get the representatives chosen on the basis of merit and not on money-power & muscle-power.

Till now, the ECI has played a commendable role in the conduct of the procedural democracy. Its innovations, such as the introduction of Booth Level Officers, Vulnerability Mapping of constituencies, Elector Photo Identity Card, EVMs and Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) have been successes. This can be seen from the increased voter turnouts (especially of the youth and the rural people) in the 2014 general elections, as well as from the popular fame (based on various surveys) that the ECI enjoys among the citizens of India. Nevertheless, the civil society too has to be vigilant to keep the shortcomings of the elected representatives in check. An efficient and clean government (leading to good governance) stresses on the education of the people and their increased awareness, which in turn sets up a positive feedback to reinforce the process of election of a good government. Indians have to remember that we the people have to be proactive (keeping in mind our fundamental duties) in the electoral process to ensure that the dance of democracy or the biggest festival of the largest democracy doesn't turn out to be a mere bonanza of vote-grabbing and power-seeking. The indelible ink marked finger isn't just an eye-catcher to be flashed around through selfies. The symbol is a reminder of the power of a citizen to decide how he/she wants to be ruled by his/her government.