Our India may be known as the world’s largest democracy but we need to have urgent and radical electoral reforms to bring the system in line with the changing times.
As Politics is no longer a mission but has become a profession, it must have a retirement age mandated by law just like other professions. Persons should also be restricted from holding office to the same elected position for a maximum of two terms. This would enable fresh faces to be infused into the system. The law must also prescribe a mandatory educational qualification for every elected position, may it be a MP, MLA, Corporator or Panchayat member. We need to amend the law to ensure that political morality prevails. The Anti-defection law came into force in 1985 to deter the endemic of political defections by legislators who are motivated by the lure of office and monetary gains. The intent of the law was to prevent corruption by way of horse-trading and to debar defecting MPs and MLAs from holding public office for five years and from contesting the next election if they defect. Goa may be India’s smallest State but has become a laboratory for every possible political experiment and has shown the nation the ways and means to circumvent the Anti- Defection law, with political prostitution and party turncoats at its very hilt. So there is a need to legally plug those loopholes in this now defective law. Ethics should always be an integral part of politics. Citizens demand ethical behaviour from the political leadership. They trust their leaders to make moral judgments of process and policy where transparency and zero tolerance to corruption and nepotism should be paramount. Lawmakers have a fundamental and moral duty to lead by example and must never be law breakers or abuse the trust that people have vested in them. Authentic Leadership can only be practiced through ethical Governance. Not to defeat the very intent of the law, there is a need to ensure that election petitions and more particularly those relating to the Anti- Defection law should be decided very expeditiously in a time bound manner by an independent authority possibly the Courts and not by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or Legislative Assemblies who instead of being fair and independent have proven to be acting as partisan tools of the ruling party. We need to ensure that by law those elected are made accountable for their deeds and misdeeds. The late American President, John F Kennedy declared ‘the basis of effective Government is public confidence and that confidence is endangered when ethical standards falter or appear to falter’. These wise words have proved to be prophetically true of our nation currently lacking in authentic leadership and good, effective Governance. Aires Rodrigues Advocate High Court C/G-2, Shopping Complex Ribandar Retreat, Ribandar – Goa – 403006 Mobile No: 9822684372 Office Tel No: (0832) 2444012 Email: airesrodrigu...@gmail.com Or airesrodrig...@yahoo.com You can also reach me on Facebook.com/ AiresRodrigues Twitter@rodrigues_aires www.airesrodrigues.com