The Hindu Business Line : Reforming the Republic

If coalition Governments (not only at the Centre but also in the States) are to be avoided for the sake of rapid economic growth, the structure of the electoral system needs to be altered.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

The issue is: we have had a Republic for the past 58 years which has functioned undisturbed, which itself is a comment on the resilience of the system that was put into place in 1950. The significance of this is clear if one looks at Pakistan which, like our own country, is a product of Partition which preceded Independence.

If one considers Bangladesh also, the innate stability of the Indian republican arrangement is underscored further, perhaps leading to the conclusion that the State system given to us by our Founding Fathers is perhaps the only workable system in the subcontinent in terms of maximising the democratic content of life of the average citizen.

The complexity of the subject becomes clear at once if one raises the issue of what exactly is meant by ‘democratic content’. Is ‘democracy’ rooted in economic independence, or is it independent of such a characteristic? If the former, then one has first to become independent economically before one can effectively participate in, and contribute to, the processes of a democratic society. Put crudely, a parliamentary democracy must then only follow a regime which has delivered the ‘economic goods’.

Power corrupts

If the latter, then the parliamentary form of our republic can be applied straightaway, the inevitable assumption being that the economic fruits will follow.

If democracy in the conventional sense is to follow a period during which the economy has been set on the path of sustained growth, the inference is that the State system to be followed during this ‘pause’, so to speak, will have to be a dictatorship, where ‘public choice’ is restricted to a minimum.

The problem with this model, as history has shown repeatedly, is that those who are entrusted with the task of ‘laying the economic foundations of a true democracy’ cannot themselves be trusted with setting temporal limits to their tenure. As they say, power corrupts, and as very recent events in Pakistan have shown, the hesitation to pass on the baton to politicians by the self-appointed guardians of the State (in this case the military) — on the ground that the country is not yet ready for a truly democratic State system — not only becomes an enduring trait of the regime concerned but also transforms itself into rigid, abiding structures of vested interest, which have only one objective, namely, to stay in the seat of power for as long as possible.

This apart, there is no guarantee that the economic policies being tried out by such regimes are the most sensible in the given conditions, which then leads to the problem of searching for, and installing, an alternative power set-up which will do things the right way. But then, who decides that the economic policies are inappropriate, and who picks and chooses the alternative set of leaders?

Clearly, if a republic is to be a ‘democratic’ republic, there is no way but to involve the choice of the people right from the very birth of the State-system, which means that ‘enforced economic development’ in order to prepare a nation for an effective democratic form of governance, which will ‘maximise’ the democratic content of the average citizen’s life, has to be ruled out. And yet, it is the primary business of any State form to make life for its citizens as comfortable as possible. In the Indian situation, if it is assumed that the economy has not grown in the way it should have given the rich resource-base involved, how can one redress this lacuna?

Economic prowess

There is now no doubt at all that Indian talent, generally, is among the best in the world, specifically in areas of knowledge and even of application which in other successful countries have been used to the best advantage. In fact, this exhibition of Indian economic prowess has been the direct result of the reforms first instituted by Dr Manmohan Singh when he was Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao Government in the first half of the 1990s. There has been no looking back since mainly because of the convergence of economic policies of the different coalition Governments that have been in power since then, and also because of the fact that the unravelling of the true economic potential of the nation has resulted in a dynamics that no politician who wants votes at the end of the day can now afford to ignore.

A large number of people are of the view today that the political system of governance in India is acting as a drag on its economic development; in other words, a different system could possibly lead to more rapid growth. The feeling essentially is that coalition Governments have too many strings pulling in different directions with the result that policies are having to be diluted, sometimes even being put on hold, to preserve a majority in the Lok Sabha.

Playing spoilsport

Usually, it is the smaller parties in terms of the number of seats they control in Parliament who are playing ‘spoilsport’, so to speak. It is not only the UPA regime that one is talking of. This feature of Indian political governance emerged in 1996 and has persisted, even strengthened, since then.

The apprehension is that, with time, coalition Governments will come to play an even larger role in the formation of regimes at the Centre, the domination of smaller parties possibly growing as the bigger, established outfits such as the Congress and the BJP begin to lose their national character. So what happens to the economy and its growth, which must form the bedrock of the ‘democratic content’ of any average citizen’s life?

There is no uncertainty about the fact that the Republic is in the pink of health. However, the same thing cannot be said about the system of political representation, which has led to a spate of coalition regimes over the past 12 years.

It appears somewhat inevitable that, if coalition Governments (not only at the Centre but also in the States) are to be avoided for the sake of rapid economic growth, the structure of the electoral system needs to be altered, the basic objective of which should be the avoidance of ruling outfits that are based on usually fractious coalitions. How this can be done effectively needs to be worked out in some detail, keeping in mind the fact that India is more federal in character than unitary.

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