The Great Indian Bazaar

Gurbachan Jagat

The run-up to the Rajya Sabha elections in a few states has been acutely painful and depressing to watch. It is not that anything new has happened but the fact that the moral slide into the sinkhole of depravity shows no sign of slowing down. The pit is bottomless and so it appears that we can go sliding down forever. The election is a case of simple arithmetic i.e. if you have the requisite number of MLAs, you win the seat, but the problem starts when you want more seats than the number of votes you have. Then new algorithms come up and factored in are mainly money power, muscle power and institutional corruption. It is a brazen display of all these qualities. You have chief ministers and party chiefs going headhunting and then flaunting their trophies for everyone to see and acknowledge their mastery of shady methods and immoral deals. You have oligarchs being put up as candidates by parties who do not have the numbers to get them elected. It is an invitation to them to enter the market and get the requisite numbers. Then these oligarchs have the gumption to claim that they have won over the required numbers. Then there are others who get elected unopposed, sponsored by parties who have the requisite numbers, some of them from states other than the one in which the election is being held. What is the quid pro quo — your guess is as good as mine.

These gentleman who cross over, do they have any ideological leanings? If so, do they cross over because the ideology of the new party is more alluring? It is nothing but the lure of power and filthy lucre. The same is true of the party which woos them and accepts their vote. Where all this fails, technical points are raised and institutional backup is obtained because of the power of patronage extended to influential individuals within these institutions from the beginning. So what do we have? Do we have a House of Elders with exceptional intellect and moral fibre who can debate and discuss the business sent to them by the Lok Sabha and then advise with their experience — No, Sir. These are mostly men of straw picked up from the market and who will raise their hand and say ‘Aye Aye’ or ‘Hai Hai’ when given the signal to do so. It is not as if this is happening now — there were early trailblazers such as Indira Gandhi, who split the Congress in order to oust the old-timers known as the ‘Syndicate’. She put up VV Giri as an Independent candidate for President and he defeated the official Congress candidate. Then there was the vaulting ambition of Ch Charan Singh, who ousted the Janata government and Morarji Desai and became Prime Minister in his stead with the outside help of Congress (I). In due course, the support was withdrawn and Mrs Gandhi became PM in 1980.

The trailblazers were followed by bigger opportunists. Haryana CM Bhajan Lal crossed over from the Janata Party with most of his Cabinet and MLAs to the Congress (I) when Mrs Gandhi became Prime Minister. He was one of the greatest tacticians in the game of power politics. Bhajan Lal was quoted as saying that “in politics, one should either take sanyas or take the right decision at the right moment”. Then we had the case of the ‘Raja nahi fakir hai, Bharat ki taqdeer hai’ — VP Singh, who left the Congress and became Prime Minister with the Janata Dal as the vehicle. His government was upended when the BJP withdrew support and Chandra Shekhar became Prime Minister, heading a breakaway faction of the Janata Dal with outside support of the Congress. The Congress then withdrew support and the government fell, leading to fresh elections, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the formation of a minority government with Narasimha Rao as PM, which lasted a full term. This was followed by hotchpotch arrangements with Deva Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral as Prime Ministers.

Subsequently, there was the famous case of the Vajpayee government falling after a few days of its formation due to the crossover of a single MP — Saifuddin Soz of the National Conference. The whole country had to undergo a fresh election because of this one vote. We finally had a stable government in 1999 with Vajpayee as Prime Minister, followed by two stable governments of the UPA. These stable governments of the NDA and UPA consisted of disparate elements with no common ideological roots. The smaller regional parties held the BJP and Congress hostage and large-scale corruption went unhindered. Today, we have a situation where we do not know what to believe. The ears hear something, the eyes see something else, the brain processes one thing and the heart feels another.

Moving on to the elections to state Assemblies and the Lok Sabha, one sees the same sordid drama being played out on a bigger canvas. Parties wait for election time as that is the season for serious headhunting. To begin with, there is no ideology involved because most of these parties have no such thing. There are election manifestos which offer photo opportunities for party leaders followed by a press conference. I have not known any party worker or voter who has actually read it. Careful homework is done to shortlist the likely candidates. Crossover assessments are made and watch is kept on elements who have been ignored in the allocation of tickets and who are highly likely crossover prospects. These big guns who cross over usually bring with them an entourage of supporters. They are usually welcomed into the new party and paraded like the return of the prodigal son by the senior leaders, chief ministers and party presidents. This display of arrogance, intellectual and moral corruption and exchange of power and money is deplorable. It comes from levels where from we expect the highest standards of intellectual and moral rectitude and it does not come by stealth. It comes in the light of the day and in full display.

Another disgraceful act in this sordid drama is the leadership’s lack of faith in its cadres and hence they are herded into buses and planes and taken to far-off resorts, lest they get enticed by opportunistic elements. They almost resemble sheep being herded into pens and guarded against poaching by wolves. These sheep are than escorted back for voting under the gaze of observers and partymen but they still manage to crossvote.

So, where do we go from here? Have you ever heard of such brazen lack of ideology and crossovers in the democracies of UK, USA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand? I have not but would be happy to be proved wrong. Parties there have well known ideologies and loyalties which run generations deep, even loyalties to football, baseball, basketball and rugby clubs run into generations. As such, you know what you are voting for and who you are voting for. As far as I know, there is no anti-defection law in these countries, there are traditions and moral convictions. We have laws but we know how to get around them. Why cannot we have a simple law which states that any sitting member who crosses over will have to resign and contest on the ticket of his new party? When you join a party, you are supposed to join at the level of your intellect and conscience, then where does the new conscience come? When it comes to the voters, the same rules apply. They also know that all the electoral promises are hot air and whatever they can get before or after in the monetary largesse of freebies is all that they will get, so to hell with ideology and grab what you can and be grateful and vote accordingly. In the words of the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan: “Yahan sab kuchh bikta hai, doston rehna zara sambhal ke… Bechne wale hawa bhi bech dete hein, gubaron mein daal ke.…”

— The writer is ex-chairman of UPSC, Former Manipur Governor and served as J&K DGP

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