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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Freedom with defects -Ramachandra Guha

Freedom with defects -Ramachandra Guha

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published Published on Feb 18, 2017   modified Modified on Feb 18, 2017
-The Telegraph

After the third general elections held in 1962, the scholar-statesman, C. Rajagopalachari, wrote a fascinating, if now forgotten, essay on the imperfections of our young democracy. "The Indian electorate", remarked Rajaji, "suffers from well-known defects from which Western democracies are relatively free. The Indian voters are in great measure poor and vulnerable to bribery: even a day's expense for food serves to buy a large number of the poor voters."

Rajaji had witnessed and campaigned in elections held in British India, and now in independent India as well. "What is to be deplored most in the recent elections", he wrote in 1962, was "the terrible rise in election expenditure and the manner in which money flowed for the purchase of the votes of the poor and illiterate. Money running so alarmingly ahead of education, leads one to ask what hope or way out is there for democracy. The hunger for good government thus foiled inevitably leads to some form of violent escape which spells disaster for democracy."

Rajaji was one of the first to comment on the role of money power in elections. This led, in turn, to the deployment of muscle power, a phenomenon that is the focus of Milan Vaishnav's new book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, a closely researched study of the increasing criminalization of Indian politics in recent decades. Vaishnav presents vivid case studies of individual goonda-politicians, matching these with the massive data-set on criminal charges against candidates assembled by that remarkable watchdog, the Association for Democratic Reforms. He then interprets this qualitative and quantitative evidence through the lens of political and economic theory.

Vaishnav begins his narrative in the late 1960s, when the decline of the Congress and the rise of multi-party competition, while good for democracy in general, also opened the door to large-scale defection as parties scrambled to forge anti-Congress alliances and governments. Candidates now changed parties for a price. Then, the decision by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1969 to ban corporate funding "was to set parties off on a competitive search for underground funding". In 1985, corporate funding was once more legalized, but by now, writes Vaishnav, "the damage had already been done," with widespread use of black money in elections. Companies now, in fact, preferred to donate in black, fearing retribution in case a party they had not funded came to power.

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The Telegraph, 18 February, 2018, https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170218/jsp/opinion/story_136280.jsp#.WKg3DDideyA


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