The mood of Indian voters

Arun Maira

Former member, Planning Commission

Political analysts try to dissect outcomes of elections to understand what the people of India really want. Reading citizens’ wishes through the lenses of their caste and religious identities has not worked to explain the recent elections in Indian states. Evidently, people don’t want to be divided by religions and castes if that comes in the way of their obtaining what they really want. They want jobs and higher incomes, affordable healthcare and education, and more law and order. They are fed up with parties dividing them to win elections.

The country needs civil society movements, uniting citizens to force changes on political establishments to take India to its tryst with democratic destiny.

Citizens want many things and may not agree about everything. Kenneth Arrow (who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1972) propounded the impossibility theorem. He proved, mathematically, that when voters have three or more options, no ranked voting electoral system can convert the preferences of individuals into a community-wide agreement. The theorem is a fundamental dilemma in social choice theory, a discipline within economics in which Nobel Laureates Douglass North and Amartya Sen worked extensively too. The theorem proves there is no voting method in which voters, by merely expressing their votes as ‘yes or no’, can produce a unanimous outcome, no matter how many rounds of votes there are. The mathematical problem here is that individual voters’ preferences cannot be sliced and diced; nor can the choices before them be made too simply as ‘this or that’ to enable easy voting and counting (as was done for Brexit, for example.)

Human preferences are formed by combinations of many factors in their histories and their present circumstances; also, by what they value most, which may not be the same as other citizens’ values. Therefore, their preference for any one candidate in an election to represent them cannot reveal their consensus about fundamental needs. Outcomes of elections in first-past-the-post systems make the reading of the tea leaves even harder, when candidates, who do not even represent an electoral majority, win.

Psephologists and political strategists in India are using lenses of caste and religion to make sense of what the people want. No doubt, everyone wants respect for who they are, regardless of their castes and religions, and whether they belong to the majority or a minority. However, their preferences on other matters will depend on their social and economic conditions and their varied local contexts.

In UP, Yogi Adityanath, the incumbent, has made history by returning to power with a majority, which had not happened for 35 years because no government was able to deliver what the people really wanted. The stunning victory of the AAP in Punjab, where leaders of the two parties that dominated Punjab’s politics for decades were unable even to retain their own seats, was a message that people are fed up with politics as usual.

Yogendra Yadav, a respected psephologist and a leader of AAP’s foundation with Arvind Kejriwal from whom he later broke away, says the recent polls have proven that political analysts were unable to understand people’s real needs. Like marketing specialists, psephologists and political strategists analyse numbers. They segment markets and design smart marketing campaigns to communicate to voters. Political communication must be a two-way process: it requires good listening to citizens too.

Yadav says a movement of change is required. ‘Satta se sangharsh, samaj se samvad’ (resistance to power, dialogue with the people), he calls it. Entrenched governments cannot withstand opponents with zeal, energy and tenacity. He recalls the spirit of the anti-CAA protest, and the farmers’ movement, and the legacy of the national movement for Independence. He also points to the Constitution as a source of inspiration.

The Constitution has two parts. Its Preamble evokes the aspirations of citizens to create a sovereign democratic republic to secure, justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity for all citizens. The rest describes the institutions with which citizens can achieve their collective aspirations democratically. They include elections and Parliament, courts of justice, etc. Such institutions, and the checks and balances, are considered the essentials of a good democracy. Parties are necessary to harness the power of people, to fight elections, and represent the interests of the people in Parliament. However, parties invariably become locked in battles amongst themselves, neglecting citizens who elected them. Citizens are losing faith in multi-party electoral democracy even in Europe and the US: single-party governance systems like China’s, and electoral autocracies which have emerged in many countries, seem more attractive to them.

Yadav and Kejriwal were leaders of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement 10 years ago, which rallied people of all classes and religions around the country to demand an end to political corruption. Elected parliamentarians of all parties united to say that Hazare and his compatriots were unelected and not entitled to represent the wishes of people. They were taunted to follow the constitutional way and win elections against them. This led to the break-up of the movement and the formation of the AAP, which has struggled to raise enough money to win elections against parties with large war chests. The successful farmers’ movement for change also dissipated with the formation of parties that could not win polls.

Civil society movements of change and parties run on different principles. Whenever movements morph into parties for elections, they become infected with diseases of money, official positions, and power. Gandhi wanted the Congress to disband after the freedom movement. He feared it would become corrupted with power and lose sight of the people. The Congress, in its present condition with little internal democracy, cannot lead a democratic movement to change politics. The country needs nonviolent, civil society movements, uniting diverse citizens to force changes on unwilling political establishments to take India to its tryst with its democratic destiny.

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