India's Negative Democracy

By M H Ahssan

Is it time we got negative about India’s democracy? Perhaps it is. India’s general elections have always been the biggest political tamasha in the world. In 1951, the first general election featured a cast of millions: 176 million voters opted for their candidates in 2,24,000 polling booths which contained two million ballot boxes; the whole exercise was supervised by 56,000 presiding officers, plus 2,80,000 helpers and 2,24,000 police personnel to maintain law and order.

Since then, things have just grown bigger and bigger: the forthcoming 15th Lok Sabha elections will star 714 million voters, 17 million, or 4 per cent of whom, are between the ages of 18 and 35, which is more than the individual populations of 161 countries in the world. Yes, things have undeniably got bigger. But have they got better? That’s the moot point.

The Indian polity is often likened to an elephant: large and lumbering and long of memory. But when in election mode, India is more like a rhino: big, certainly, yet capable of unexpected turns of speed which, coupled with a dangerously unpredictable temperament, makes it a creature it’s foolhardy to trifle with.

However, despite repeated ballot box upsets and routs at the hustings — when voters have made their displeasure emphatically felt through the antiincumbency factor or by rejecting odds-on favourites who thought they had victory in their pockets — all too many candidates and the political formulations they represent have taken increasing liberties with voters’ patience and sense of proprieties. Ever since coalition formation has become an inescapable fact of political life, blatant opportunism — as opposed to ideology — has been made the cornerstone of all pre- and post-poll alliances.

Such politics makes not just for strange but for positively shameless bedfellows. Parties which might have opposed each other tooth and claw over a range of issues, social or economic, have no hesitation in swiftly burying their differences if it means ‘coming into power’ (in India, governments always ‘come into power’ to rule us; they never ‘assume office’ in order to serve us) by turning yesterday’s foes into today’s friends, and vice versa. Voters, of course, have long got used to such somersaults and other acrobatics and try to exploit them to their own advantage. But the result, inevitably, has been a growing cynicism regrading the moral and ethical fibre of our political class as a whole. And while scepticism — the due diligence of doubt — is the oxygen of democracy, cynicism — the conviction that everything is fraudulent — is its bane.

Increasing cynicism regarding the political class is arguably the greatest danger posed today to our still robust democracy. Regrettably, this cynicism is inescapable given not just the overt opportunism but the rank criminality of all too many of our political representatives: the last Lok Sabha had no fewer than 125 MPs, almost 25 per cent of the House, belonging to parties across the board who faced, and are still facing, criminal charges, many of a serious nature, including rape and murder.

How do we decriminalise our politics? How do we help to make the electorate less cynical about the people they willy-nilly must vote for, no matter what little faith or trust the voter has in them, for the simple reason that all the candidates are equally undesirable?

One possible answer to these and similar questions is the introduction of the negative vote, by which voters can reject all the candidates standing in any given constituency if they feel that not one of them is worth voting for. Fear of the negative vote — which in a way is a precursor of, and a possible way of obviating, the anti-incumbency factor — could force parties to field more suitable candidates.

The negative vote is sometimes seen as a short-circuiting of the democratic process. On the contrary, used judiciously it could help greatly to empower the electorate by giving people a better quality of candidate, to the overall betterment of our polity.

So, is it time we got negative about our democracy? Because, in this case, a negative democracy would be positive.