What’s in an election?

What’s in an election?

Election; democracy

News:

1. SundarSarukkai, Professor of Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, analyses the role of elections in a democracy.

Important Analysis:

2. The significance of democracy lies in how power is exercised by those elected to power.

3.The defining principle of democracy is the principle of One Person One Vote.

4. Over emphasis on the principle of One Person One Vote:

• It has reduced the idea of democracy to a ritual of casting votes.
• The act of participation in a democracy was conceived as a dynamic and continuous process. But in a few years it has been reduced to merely an act of voting.
• The society thus formed is fundamentally undemocratic in character.
• The parties which speak for democracy have little democratic ethos within them.
• Political parties are dominated by families or friends or business partners.
• Nepotism and exclusion are the basic working principles of our political parties.

5. Today, voting has become a business transaction where the voters are ‘compensated’ for their votes.
6. Significance of voting:

• Voting makes sure that those who have power are accountable in some way and that they exercise that power in a democratic manner.
•  Elections are only a means towards the goal of controlling those who wield power, but instead they have become the end in themselves.

7. In India, the mere exercise of voting or choosing a representative is being equated with democracy. This results in the election of people who govern undemocratically.
8. The Principle of trusteeship:

• It was advocated by Gandhiji and even industrialists like J.R.D Tata.
• All of us have an equal claim to the public goods in the society we belong to.
• Elections help us implement the principle of trusteeship.
• Through elections we choose a person to take care of the ‘public wealth’ that belongs equally to all of us.
• The elected representatives are merely trustees on our behalf and it is a primary duty of the trustee to make sure that they do not destroy what they are trustees of.
• This principle of trusteeship has been completely destroyed by merely viewing democracy as an act of voting.

9. Good governance implies that these “trustees” take decisions and implement them so as to protect the common public goods.
10. Instead of protecting the common goods, the elected representatives take our share of the public wealth for their personal gain.
11. Other institutions are affected due to this watered down notion of democracy:

• Very few institutions inculcate democratic values in their functioning.
• Private institutions have little commitment to democracy. In an overall set up where democracy is not respected, they lose their little sense of trusteeship.

12. Political alienation happens because people are a part of the political process only for the few minutes when they cast their votes.

13.Political alienation leads to cultural alienation which in turn leads to right wing movements.

14. In order to get rid of most of the problems plaguing India, not only choice, but even power has to be democratised.