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Corruption and Fairy Tale Elections

-EPW

Graft is a major issue in people’s lives, but it is unlikely to figure in voter choice in the assembly elections.

A mini-general election will be upon us in February as fivestates go to the polls. Given the high-pitched outpouringson the electronic media around the anti-corruption campaign and the live coverage of the proceedings in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha on the Lokpal Bill, we have been led to believe that corruption will be one of the key issues in the elections. The anti-corruption crusaders, led by Anna Hazare, have promised to put all their vaunted strength, now somewhat dented by the feeble response to their last campaign, to ensure the defeat of the Congress Party for bringing in a weak Lokpal Bill. But will corruption actually be a determining factor?

Given the pattern of voting over the last decade and more, it is clear that the Indian voter is not lured by catchy slogans or media campaigns. This was especially evident during the 2004 general elections when the National Democratic Alliance’s India Shining campaign failed to bring it back to power. An obvious message from that spectacular failure was that success on the hustings in India depends on a whole host of local factors and is determined by what voters see on the ground and not by an apparent hawa that only psephologists and media commentators seem to sense. So corruption might be an issue in television studios and on talk shows, but it does not necessarily translate into voter choice on the ground.

If the 2004 and 2009 general elections proved difficult to predict, the 2012 state assembly elections will be even more so. The outcome in Uttar Pradesh (UP), the largest and politically the most important state of the five, is far from certain. The opposition assumes that anti-incumbency will give them a chance to grab power. But shifting the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which in 2007 won an impressive 206 out of 403 assembly seats, will not prove that easy. The Samajwadi Party (SP) has to live down misgovernance during its years in power. And the Congress Party, despite Congress general secretary ­Rahul Gandhi’s months-long campaign and the central government’s last-minute sops to win over the minority vote, must contend with its long-standing inability to win back an electorate whose loyalty it lost many years ago. In the other four states too, there are multiple factors that will influence voter choice.

As for making the fight against corruption an election issue, no party is in a position to confidently project that it is against corruption given the murky record of every single one of them. How, for instance, can the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose government in Karnataka is hardly exemplary, argue that it supported a strong Lokpal when it voted against the constitutional amendment to make the Lokpal a statutory body? Similarly, the Congress can hardly cover its corrupt record by claiming credit for finally introducing a weak and deficient anti-corruption law. Of course, corruption is a real concern and does affect the poor and the powerless the most. But none of the major political parties are likely to focus on corruption.

Previous election results clearly show that the moral stature, or the lack thereof, of candidates does not appear to affect voter choice. A relevant illustration is the 2007 election in UP that brought the BSP to power. According to an assessment of elected representatives in the 2007 UP assembly conducted by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), 35%, or 139 out of the 395 MLAs whose election records were analysed, had criminal charges pending against them. These 139 were evenly spread across parties in terms of the percentage of candidates with criminal records. Thus while 34% of the MLAs of the ruling BSP had criminal records, 37% of the SP, 28% of the BJP, 36% of the Congress Party and 40% of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) legislators had criminal records. In other words, no party was significantly better than the other in terms of the percentage of candidates facing criminal charges. It is unlikely that this basic profile of the people who stand for and win elections will change in the forthcoming elections in UP.

In smaller states like Goa, with a literate population, issues such as corruption, or the violation of environmental laws, could become election issues and determine the fates of individual candidates. However, even in Maharashtra, where the government of the ruling Congress Party-Nationalist Congress Party coalition has been marked by corruption scandals, both parties did surprisingly well in the recent urban local body elections. This suggests that a whole host of factors, including but not only the manifestos of the political parties, national and local alliances, caste and community factors, and ground-level realities such as the availability of water, electricity and roads, are more likely to affect electoral choices than the ­extent of corruption. This might be a cynical view of the election battleground but it is more realistic than the fairy tale woven by the anti-corruption brigade that has yet to contest an election.