Democracy�s inconvenient fact - PETER RONALD deSOUZA
Making sense of Indian democracy has been for many of us a continuing obsession. This is driven not by curiosity alone for deep down, at the bottom of our souls, is the fervent hope that despite its lapses and deficits democracy is determinedly moving India forward. From the grim building blocks of caste and feudal India, the indignity of exclusions and marginality, comes the belief that a decent society will emerge because of democracy. It is modern India�s silver bullet. Enough is not enough. We need more democracy. There is an implicit teleology to this belief which holds that which comes later constitutes an advancement over that which has come earlier, that the processes which democracy engenders are invariably morally superior to the practices that preceded it. While one would generally agree with such a progressive reading of history, since democracy does push forward an egalitarian and participatory public agenda, one would, however, like to complicate it a little by the introduction of an �inconvenient fact�. This strategy of using an �inconvenient fact� to problematize a generalization has great heuristic value since it makes the self-evident truth less self-evident; it compels us to think not just morally but also spatially and temporally and requires us to search for caveats and qualifiers. The history of democracy is such a dialectical history where processes begin to undermine institutions and where institutions respond by introducing new qualifiers that processes then again begin to undermine. I shall illustrate this by looking at the last two decades of party competition in Goa. These decades of democratic politics in Goa can be read from several viewpoints: the subaltern viewpoint which sees it as a great step forward when �voice� has been given to suppressed and excluded groups who have now entered politics and begun to make it their own in their own way; the elite viewpoint which sees it as a period of institutional decay when the new political leaders who have come from among the masses and who, through their political behaviour, stretch the limits of what is permissible in a democracy, keep redefining its Laxman Rekha; the political economy viewpoint which sees the state as being taken over by many vested interests, especially the class of politicians and bureaucrats, and the super-rich mine-owners, all of whom extract considerable rent from it, converting the state into a rentier state; or the institutional viewpoint which sees the state as evolving through a dialectical relationship between institution and process wherein the former regulates political behaviour and the latter seeks to stretch such regulation to its limits and sometimes to go beyond it. All these viewpoints have certain validity. Rather than discuss the political in Goa through each of these lenses I shall, instead, present Goa as an �inconvenient fact� for Indian democracy. The aspect that I wish to dwell on is the political behaviour of elected political representatives within the party system in Goa since it poses a challenge for our thinking about representative democracy. Most of the commentaries on such political behaviour in Goa either denounce it (which is often the case) on the assumption that there is a model of good behaviour from which this is regarded as a gross deviation, an imaginary model which does not exist anywhere, or just ignore it. What we need to do, instead, is to analyze it since it contains some knotty problems for our thinking about representation in a democracy. The following will give us a sense of what happens when electoral democracy begins to be the main measure of the democratic system. In the 43 years since Goa�s liberation from colonial rule, the party system went (perhaps evolved!) through the following four phases. I shall discuss these four phases somewhat sketchily, since what I wish to do is to mainly present their distinctive features. In the first phase from 1963-1977, the party system in Goa exhibited the classical pattern of a two party alternating system where one party, the MGP (Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party), formed the government and the other party, the UGP (United Goans Party), formed the opposition. This produced a contest between the two local parties, each with distinct social bases that they sought to mobilize and consolidate behind them. Each presented a vision of Goa that was then offered to the electorate. The MGP vision, based on giving presence to the Bahujan in the state, seemed to get more takers and over the decade and a half gained in support. This first phase can be interpreted as one when the representative, even though at some social remove from the social base, acts on behalf of the welfare or interests of the represented. In this phase representative democracy has arrived but not been appropriated by the masses and hence its functioning is still guided by the classes who set the rules of what is permissible and what is not. The second phase from 1977-1989 was when the UGP declines precipitously as a party and the Congress, first as Congress (U) and then Congress (I) when all the Congress (U) legislators defect to the Congress (I)1 , era begins. This spells the end of the two regional party system since now the contest is between a national and a regional party. Because of the superior resources of the Congress, and its greater capacity to manage the elections and the new aspirations that democracy has produced from among the rising groups among the Bahujan, alongside the increased resources of the developmental state now available for patronage, the contest between a national and a regional party becomes an unequal contest. MLAs, by now, have learned the art of �politics in India� as factional politics begins to appear within the Congress. Leaders from different regions and groups start to play the politics of manoeuvre as they seek control of the party and the state. Decision-making by representatives, in and for Goa, now has to contend with another level of veto, the party high command in Delhi to whom appeals are made, endorsements sought, and whose authority gets invoked to settle party disputes. The arrival of the national party weakens the bond between the representative and the represented, since now the representative has also to satisfy the political calculus of the high command. The representative somehow feels freed from the constraint of being bound to the represented, in a direct sense, which was the dominant feeling in the first phase, and thereby begins to redefine his/her role more in terms of the independence rather than the mandate theory of representation. Although this is difficult to empirically establish, it can be deduced from the behaviour of representatives in the third phase of party politics, from 1989-2002. This third phase is the most difficult to interpret in terms of the representative theory of democracy because it is marked by defections in the legislature party, splits, several changes in chief ministers and hence of government in one assembly period, re-election of those who have indulged in these floor-crossings, partisan decisions by speakers who were the adjudicatory authority charged with policing deviant behaviour under the 52nd Amendment, and rewards for defectors who were given cabinet berths which set the trend of Jumbo cabinets etc. This third phase, from 1989-2002, of party politics in Goa is punctuated by three important milestones in the history of the state. None of them makes any significant difference to the behaviour of representatives other than to possibly exacerbate this behaviour of changing parties or governments. The first milestone is the passing of the Anti-Defection Act in 1985 which, in its own words as spelled out in the objects and reasons, states that �the evil of political defections has been a matter of national concern. If it is not combated, it is likely to undermine the very foundations of our democracy and the principles which sustain it� This Bill is meant for outlawing defection...�3 There are two important consequences of this 52nd Amendment. (a) Instead of individuals defecting, now groups defect, with each time one-third of the legislature party shifting allegiance from the party on which they were elected to parties who they opposed before and during the election. Party ideology and manifestoes do not constrain their behaviour. That is why one sees a host of new parties, with absurd names, being formed inside the legislature to give the defecting group an aura of legitimacy. These parties have a short shelf life. The list of names to distinguish these short shelf life legislature parties, from Goa Rajiv Congress to distinguish it from the Congress but to hold onto the legacy of Rajiv Gandhi who had been assassinated, to Goa People�s Congress (Venkatesh Desai) to more brazenly UGDP (Mickky) a single member party, captures the absurdity of this phase of party politics. (b) The high office of the speaker now gets compromised, with speakers taking partisan stands and giving decisions, under the Amendment, that favour the government in power to whom they owe their position. Goa shows the inherent infirmity of the Anti-Defection Act since it appears incapable of constraining the �evil of political defections�.4 The changes in chief minister and government in the seventh, eighth and ninth assemblies, as shown in Table I, illustrates this infirmity. The second milestone is the change in the political status of Goa from a Union Territory to a State of the Indian Union, in 1987. State politics now gets insulated from interference (not high command politics which continues to have a decisive say) by the ministries of the Union given India�s federal structure. The resources of the state are now more easily available for patronage and do not need clearance from central ministries. This changes the political economy of representative behaviour. Further, since there are now 40 MLAs who have to be accommodated by this calculus of power, new skills of negotiation and manipulation are called into play. >From January 1990 till December 1994, the state witnesses seven governments, with some chief ministers lasting for two days, 19 days, eight months and so on. In one assembly, from 1990-2002, 14-20 representatives defect, some more than once. In the 9th assembly there are 44 defectors more than the strength of the house, which only means that some members did so multiple times. This implies that statehood too does not pose as a constraint to behaviour and that the phase inaugurated by the entry of national political parties makes the stakes for control of the state higher and the payoffs for defection more attractive. This is also the period, particularly during its last few years, when the other regional party, the MGP, also declines. This marks the third milestone when politics in Goa now becomes the playing field of the two national parties, the Congress and the BJP. The BJP is able to manipulate the various factions in the Congress, which is ridden by factionalism and which the party high command is unable to discipline, and have its first shot at government, which it does in 2000. In fact this first period of BJP rule, where the BJP did a Congress on the Congress by playing one faction against the other and thereby forming the government with the help of dissident factions and allowing them to enjoy the spoils of office, makes one feel that all one got was Congress (BJP) rule, to maintain the absurdity of this phase of party names and party politics. BJP rule was not the rule of the party with a difference; there was no difference. The behaviour of the representatives remained the same, in fact was encouraged by the BJP, as new Laxman Rekhas were crossed in the pursuit of interest, both personal and public. Land conversion was at the heart of such pursuit with all of Goa being the market for land. A Corporation of Panaji Bill was passed without debate and overnight Panaji became a corporation from a municipality. And so on, a series of decisions too numerous to catalogue. This phase of compulsive defections comes to an end with the passage of the 91st Amendment in 2003. This is a recognition that the institutional constraints that were supposed to come into being with the passage of the 52nd Amendment were ineffective and that additional constraints were necessary. The statement of reasons of this 91st Amendment reads thus: �Demands have been made from time to time in certain quarters for strengthening the Anti-Defection Law as contained in the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India, on the grounds that these provisions have not been able to achieve the desired goal of checking defections. The Tenth Schedule has also been criticized on the ground that it allows bulk defections while declaring individual defections as illegal.� Goa seems to have been uppermost in their minds. To give representative democracy in Goa a more decent turn, based on a belief that Goa deserves better than what it got in the third phase of its party politics, the 91st Amendment omits clause three of the 10th Schedule seen as the source of the infirmity. What we see here is a classic struggle between institutions, which seek to discipline political behaviour and bring it in line with the values that the institution seeks to promote, and representative behaviour, which sees these institutions as unfairly constraining their pursuit of both personal and public interests. Representatives hence seek to go beyond the limits imposed by these institutions. The 91st Amendment is a tough Act to beat since it does not recognize splits. A member is thus compelled to walk the hazardous route of resigning and re-contesting, i.e., facing the uncertainty of an election and of being punished by the electors for being ineffective. Getting past the 91st Amendment is thus very difficult. One would expect that this would finally result in the triumph of the institution over the process, i.e., confirming the classical theory which sees institutions as not just defining the rules of the game but also determining what values are established in society. Representative democracy requires elected representatives to be loyal to their parties and seek to promote their interests through party competition within the party system. These are the rules of the game as defined by the 91st Amendment. It sets the stage for the fourth phase of party politics in Goa. Even this tough new obstacle, the 91st Amendment, does not deter the game of crossing over that has become a mark of the Goan MLA. In the battle for the control of the house in the 10th assembly when the BJP got 17 MLAs, Congress 16, UGDP 3, MGP 2, NCP 1, Independent 1, the BJP formed the government with the support of the UGDP, MGP, and the independent. The MGP and UGDP split before the passage of the 91st Amendment which was passed in July 2003, and one faction of 2 MLAs of the UGDP continued to support the BJP and 1 MLA of the MGP joined the BJP. But more is to come. New strategies of securing the government and destabilizing the opposition are planned and attempted. The test case of this attempt of testing the efficacy of the 91st Amendment is tried in the Poinguinim constituency. The bye-election in Poinguinim highlights the fact that institutions and processes exist in a dialectical relationship. The Congress MLA resigns from the assembly. Although it is alleged that he is bought over by the UGDP member who is the Minister for Town and Country Planning and who is in the money lending business, his official reasons for resigning make curious reading. He states that, �Of late I have found that there have been several attempts by the leaders of the Congress party to create instability in the political set-up of this state by dethroning the government by engaging in the process of horse-trading,� this said after long association with the Congress, first as an independent and then as a member. Then it gets curiouser and curiouser. He accuses the Congress, the party he is leaving, of �concentrating only on making allegations as regards the International Film Festival of India totally forgetting the development in their constituencies or of the state or to play a constructive role in being an effective opposition�.6 (emphasis mine). All very noble. His charge of horse-trading reads like JPs critique of parliamentary democracy. He is even willing to go to the extent of resigning to uphold these values of good political behaviour. But that is when it ends. He then goes and joins the BJP. �Does one say what one means or does one mean what one says,� wondered Alice. The BJP which had fought him tooth and nail in the previous two elections develops amnesia, overlooks the claims of its own cadre, and not only admits him but gives him a ticket to contest the bye-election caused by his resignation. The campaign is high profile and both sides pull out all stops to win. The Congress alleges the use of money and muscle power with the GPCC president stating that �there was total use, abuse and misuse of government machinery and the police were directly involved in the elections�,7 whereas the BJP counters that the Congress had �unleashed terror in Poinguinim and therefore many BJP electors had been unable to exercise their franchise� and that some �police officers may have acted in connivance with the Congress leaders�.8 The new BJP candidate, or as they say on visiting cards the ex-Congress candidate, won handsomely, polling 6963 to 4468 for the candidate of the entire opposition. He even increased his share of votes from 49.42% in 2002 to 60.90% in 2004. Clearly, even the 91st Amendment is no deterrent to defections; it only makes it so much harder. Goa is indeed a challenge to democratic theory. Does this episode signify an erosion of representative democracy, making it look more like an oligarchy, or does it signify a strengthening of representative democracy since the MLA had resigned and recontested? Assuming that representative behaviour is similar across India, that Goan representatives are no better or worse than representatives elsewhere, (difficult to believe but true), then this outcome demands explanation. Three concurrent explanations can be forwarded. The first is that representatives are unconstrained by the moral spirit of the two constitutional amendments that expects certain standards of representative behaviour as described in the goal of curbing the �evil of defections�. Representatives instead seem to embody the �anything goes until it is proscribed� rule of behaviour and hence, in the third and fourth phases of party politics, most MLAs irrespective of their party affiliations demonstrated behaviour that presses at the limits of what is permitted. The representatives appear increasingly more autonomous in their pursuit of power. The need for the constitutional order to define what is permitted and what is proscribed is hence very important. This unfortunately, in newer democracies, has to be done by law since we do not yet have a body of conventions or social norms that set these limits. Regulation of political behaviour has perforce to be legal not moral. It also shows the continuing tussle between institutions and processes. The second explanation, for the result of the Poinguinim election and of most closely contested elections in Goa, is the aspect of winability of the candidate. Winability has come to define the whole electoral process in Goa and the methods of ensuring such winability can range from threat and intimidation to inducement and allurement. (I wonder if the anti-conversion law applies to such cases of changing beliefs and loyalties. It should since the moral arguments in both cases are identical.) Deconstructing these aspects of winability would reveal a great pragmatism towards politics, where yesterday�s sworn enemy becomes today�s closest friend, where promises made and ideological agendas annunciated, must yield to the demands of realpolitik. This is true for both the Congress and the BJP in Goa. Winability has an even more cynical aspect to it. It indicates a capacity to manage an election not just through good practice but also through force and fear. The resources available to the candidates are significant. Goa is a good example of such management since constituencies are small and candidates can tell which group voted for them and which did not. Small constituencies reduce the aspect of uncertainty of outcome if money and muscle can be brought to bear on them. Small is not always beautiful. Goa is moving in this direction of reduced uncertainty. Poinguinim, as per the reports, seems to illustrate these aspects of winability. The candidate does not even reside in the constituency and is not on its electoral rolls. Despite this he has represented the constituency for three terms. Nevertheless, he alleges that he has been unable to develop his constituency since he was in the opposition. This is really a conundrum. The third explanation relates to the capacity of political institutions to discipline political behaviour. They seem to succeed but only for a time as politicians find new ways of bypassing the rules. Analyzing this aspect of politics in Goa, the many ways in which it is possible to defect in which Goa has excelled, raises three very big questions for our thinking about representative democracy. First, what is the correlation, if any, between high Human Development Indices (HDI) and good governance? Goa seems to indicate that the relationship is weak, that we need to look at the problem in terms of both necessary and sufficient conditions. HDI appears to be only a necessary condition since this same period of the second and third phases of party politics, when Goa went through an intense period of political instability and defections, has simultaneously produced high HDI in Goa.. Second, are small constituencies better for producing fair outcomes? Again we need to think of how threat and intimidation are more effective in achieving desired outcomes in smaller constituencies than big ones that are marked by greater uncertainty since they are less amenable to management of outcomes. We need to think about when is small ideal and when is big self-defeating. We need to weigh the impersonality of the big city, which gives freedom, against the intimacy of the village, which imposes constraint. And third, we need to consider whether this political behaviour of representatives is a travesty of representative democracy or its finest expression? Has Goa become more representative or less? The bye election in Poinguinim throws up this challenge of evaluation. Looked at in this way, the politics of Goa is indeed Indian democracy�s inconvenient fact. Footnotes: A. Rubinoff, The Construction of a Political Community: Integration and Identity in Goa. Sage, New Delhi, 1998. Statement of objects and reasons of the 10th Schedule of the Constitution. Lolita D�Souza, Defections and the Political Process in Goa (1963-1977), M.Phil dissertation of Madurai Kamaraj University. May 2000. Navhind Times on the Web: Goa, 20/8/2004. Ibid., 17/10/2004. Ibid., 16/10.2004. - Forwarded by Gaspar Almeida, www.goa-world.com ___Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. Konkani Drama "NOORA" by Micheal D'Silva under the auspices of United Friends Club-Kuwait on 8th April 2005. 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