Making A Difference

Vote For Curry

Indian democracy is a Raj legacy, but it can teach its old master a thing or two about poll management

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Vote For Curry
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Britain may be the mother of parliamentary democracy in at least some of its present forms, but that surely doesn’t stop it from looking at what appears to be an oversized offspring (India) with some amazement. What is taken for granted in India, or at most cynically noted, looks from here like a story of choice management that an American could call awesome. For, the Indian election is being widely seen here as a logistical wonder. And it is a model Britain is looking at closely. From the time the Electoral Commission was established in Britain in 2000, its official—Karamjit Singh—has been visiting India every year to draw on Indian experiences.

"Our democracy may be old but our Electoral Commission is very young," chairman Sam Younger told Outlook. "I think we can learn from the Indian experience and already have. We were fairly startled, 50,000 polling stations in the UK in a general election and 8,50,000 in an Indian general election. It’s remarkable what the scale in India is."

Counterparts from other Commonwealth countries who come to the Electoral Commission, London, are often advised to talk instead to the Indian Election Commission, partly because Britain’s Electoral Commission does not have responsibility for actually running an election; that is the job of individual returning officers. The Electoral Commission here was formed in 2000 to monitor election expenses and suggest changes in electoral laws.

Prof John Harriss of the London School of Economics says it’s rather remarkable that a country as large as India should have remained a western-style parliamentary democracy through its more than 50 years of post-Independence history. And this notwithstanding some problems Indian democracy encounters. Harriss lists two—rigging of the ballot and criminals contesting elections from inside jails. "But I don’t think these aspects outweigh in the end an appreciation of what a remarkable achievement it is that elections in India are held in such an enormous population with an extraordinary kind of efficiency," he adds.

No wonder, Indian election expertise is now on annual offer to chief election officers from several Commonwealth countries through the Cambridge conference on democracy organised by the University of Cambridge. The conference, chaired by former chief election commissioner M.S. Gill, will meet next July 8 and 9. Several Cambridge academics and election officers asked last year for India rather than the US to play a part in restoring democracy to Iraq given its experience in organising an election across diverse groups.

"People from so many countries see India as very advanced," says Gill. "They want to learn what we have been doing and how we do it. India is seen as the model and willy-nilly the conference becomes a discussion about the Indian experience with democracy, which dominates the proceedings for obvious reasons. The conference becomes a two-day seminar on how we do it." The conference led last year to a delegation to Nigeria headed by Gill to help set up the Nigerian election arrangements.

This time the use of the electronic voting machines is being watched closely. They are smaller, but probably harder to capture. That could make them a particularly useful tool in India "because at the individual constituency-level in India there is a stronger tradition of disputing the results of an election than in this country," says Younger. Britain sticks to the good old paper and pencil. But if that were to change, Younger says they might skip a generation and go into voting over the internet. That might encourage better voter turnout. Britain’s experiments with postal voting suggests a better turnout when people do not actually have to turn out to vote. Considering the reluctance of the urban middle class in India to go to the polling booth, perhaps the country ought to mull over methods of enhancing the voter turnout.

India could also learn from the UK’s experience with regard to funding of elections—an issue debated quite passionately in both countries. The Electoral Commission in Britain has just about completed a countrywide review of funding for elections and referendums. The spending limit for a party during parliamentary elections is £19.23 million (Rs 150 crore). That is the ceiling for a party that contests all 650 constituencies (with an average electorate of 70,000) in a year up to election time. But no party has declared that level of expenditure yet.

Harriss says he’s struck by the resources political parties in India, particularly theBJP, spend on elections. He feels there’s a strong case for the Election Commission in India to contain expenditure on and around elections. Where could these cuts be? Younger says that until the last British election in 2001 there were no limits on what a party could spend on nationwide advertising. "That is where the escalation was," he says.

Britain hopes the ban on advertising on TV and radio could curb election expenditure. In the last consultations, Younger says, "there was near unanimity across the political spectrum that we should sustain that ban, because otherwise that is opening up a huge and virtually insatiable demand for money. There’s quite a strong sense that we don’t want to go down the route of the US, of an election process being driven more and more by a race to get and spend money." Ditto India. Says Gill: "On donations to parties we’ve some complicated legislation. But it needs to be clarified, simplified and strengthened. Business houses should be able to contribute to expenses only within clear regulations laid down by Parliament. This will protect democracy."

Donors are required to declare themselves and the amounts they donate. But openness may not be enough. Says Younger: "There’s the suspicion that even if it’s declared, if somebody gives a large amount of money to a political party, it must mean at the very least that they have better access than others to the corridors of power. So, there is a case for limiting such donations." Spending by individual candidates has been strictly limited for some time. That limit depends on the size of constituencies, but even in the largest constituency, the Isle of Wight with just above 1,00,000 voters, the allowance for a candidate is less than £10,000 (Rs 7. 8 lakh).

Near unanimity has arisen also that those 19.23 million permissible pounds could be a few million too many. And this unanimity has arisen less from principle than through experience that spending a lot of money does not necessarily help a lot. "A lot of parties are quite sceptical of how much good spending a lot of money does them," Younger says. "There’s not a lot of evidence that big poster advertising, for instance, makes a great deal of difference. The evidence is that what makes a great deal of difference is having your party activists as volunteers on the ground, talking to electors."

But that itself takes money, says Harriss. "It’s generally acknowledged that in the polls to the four states in November theBJP’s victory was a victory of organisation," he says. "But the fact that the election was so skilfully managed by (Arun) Jaitley & Co also rested on them having resources to spend, not least in building up local information. So, I don’t think that improved party organisation necessarily reduces the emphasis on funding of advertisements and that sort of thing."

So, is there any distinct message the Indian election sends globally? Harriss thinks there is. Despite India’s long association with the erstwhile Soviet Union, despite the tremors of Pokhran II, Harriss feels there is still a strong sense of India as being "on our side and at least reasonably stable".

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