Party-pooper
By sanitising election campaigns and selectively censoring their messages, the Election Commission has taken on the mantle of a culture police. Only the voter stands to lose.
Elections are held so that political parties can contest, under neutral supervision, for votes sufficient to ensure that one of them wins and so gains power to govern. When neutrality is breached through open suspicion of one or more contestants in the elections, it is damaging. For the spectacle — exaggerated, theatrical, expensive and, therefore, ridiculous — of two institutions, the Election Commission (EC) and political parties engaged in a public fight, lowers the dignity and credibility of both.
By casting suspicion on the methods by which West Bengal has voted in six state assembly elections in the last 29 years, in other words, manipulating legitimacy via scientific rigging, the EC has cast suspicion on itself. In classic bureaucratic style, the EC has, by stretching the process of conducting elections over ‘five phases’ in West Bengal, four in Bihar, three in Kerala, two in Assam and one in Tamil Nadu, revealed that it is trying to cover up past rule failures with new rule creation, or more prompt rule implementation, just as it has done in the office of profit issue.
In converting the election process, in West Bengal and earlier in Bihar, into a prestige fight, where reputations matter more than reason, the EC and its rapidly proliferating agents, a.k.a. observers, are sparing neither themselves nor the institutions with which they engage from further ridicule. With Bollywood making money out of the collusion between crime, corruption, corporates, bureaucracy and politicians during elections, it is common knowledge that bureaucracies are neither above politics nor immune from contamination by interests and connections.
The EC may think that by organising flawless polling in Bihar, it helped the people deliver a verdict against Lalu Prasad Yadav that they had been too afraid of doing in the past. That is nonsense; the people delivered a fractured mandate in February 2005 and then decided to get themselves a government, not Lalu, in November. For the people calculate differently: will voting for candidate A make life unliveable, once the elections are over? Will voting for candidate B settle past debts? Will voting for candidate C be a good social investment?
In attempting to protect democracy from itself, the EC has not only gagged the multiplicity of voices that could be heard during an election campaign, but by selectively censoring and sanitising the messages and their vivid, vigorous delivery, the commission has converted itself into a culture policeman, even as it has increased the vulnerability of the aam aadmi. The assumption is that if the method is correct, then the answer will come out correct too, as though politics were mathematically determined.
By banning the noise and colour that contributes to the excitement of the Indian election, the Election Commission has ignored its utility and invaded the modes of discourse within the Indian public sphere. The joyless rules of supercilious bureaucrats and the social strata that they connect to are incomprehensible to the aam aadmi, for whom graffiti, slogans, mass meetings and openness are modes of participation in the democratic process. For India does have the largest number of the world’s illiterates, all Indians do not have televisions, and most do not have the time to spare to stop and listen to posses of politicians delivering messages individually.
Without taking a reality check and merely adopting goal rational methods, the EC has banned low-cost non-invasive campaign techniques for high-cost extremely invasive methods that are life-threatening for many. Without the resources or the anonymity of metro spaces, the aam aadmi is a sitting duck. Home delivery of political messages increases the vulnerability of the individual and the EC may find that it has not done the good it believes it has.
People, like the trader in Binpur in West Midnapore, an area where the Maoists have called for a vote boycott, know that voting is a complicated matter. It is not a one-off act. There are calculations and concerns that the ballot cannot address. Fear is a factor, and it has touched the EC too; Maoist posters calling for a vote boycott have not been touched, though in Kolkata and other districts defacement has been banned.
The EC’s confusion arises from equating votes to legitimacy, though the first is a process that can be controlled and the other is politics and out of its control. Neither scientific rigging nor rational, free choice works, if the idea of legitimacy is challenged by sufficient numbers of people and others join them. If people think that the verdict is a falsification of their wishes, then they tend to take to streets and bring the business of government to a halt. If West Bengal’s voters believe that the verdict is false, they will do what the Peruvians did in May 2000 to President Fujimori, or the Thais to Prime Minister Thaksin this month — chucked him out by taking to the streets.
Indian-style elections are appropriate to a democracy, which is not as democratic as the textbooks would deem acceptable and yet manages to deliver verdicts that are astonishingly mature. Since legislators will never be elites engaged in a restrained discourse within a pocket-size public sphere, the Election Commission should do a re-think; for by throttling the political campaign, gagging leaders from thundering against authority, cleaning walls and removing banners, the EC is applying antiseptic when what it needs is a tourniquet.