Watching Arif Mohammed Khan’s interview to the INDIA TODAY TV channel yesterday — :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZX1kjSwD1I&list=TLPQMTUwMjIwMjK9NbfHh3ocDA&index=2 — I felt his seems to be the only sane voice on the currently raging issue of Hijab in schools, colleges and secular Public institutions in India … But then his voice and those of other moderates like him are getting drowned out by the din of shrill and hysterical rhetoric of politicians and the blare of the omnipresent news-media commentariat.
It is precisely to prevent irresponsible politicians and anti-national, anti-social and vested-interests whipping up and continually stoking public frenzy on a host of sensitive, emotive issues that is ever simmering inside our vast country that I for one would gladly vote for changing the electoral system in India. Elections, both in States and at the Centre should, ideally, be held only once simultaneously in a period of 5 years … or, practically at best, if not simultaneously, then with an interval of 2.5 years between Lok Sabha election and all-State Assembly elections.
The above electoral reform is the crying need of the hour!
Frequently held elections in any one or more of the 30-odd States and Union Territories during the 5-year term of one Parliament at the Centre is simply creating chaos and instability within India. To add another dimension to the already insane problem, we also have in this vast country the holding of Local Body elections which turn out to be even more raucous and fractious!
Everybody seems to be in a state of hysteria and pent-up anger throughout any calendar year on account of either this or that national or sub-national issue being whipped up around election times —- whether it is Hijab, Cow-lynching, Talaq, Kashmiri separatist politicians, Temple or Mosque destruction, communal riot, corruption scandals, centre-state federalism pissing-matches… and what not !
It’s an endless litany of public grievances, complaints (real, perceived and imagined) and dissatisfactions about state of affairs in India to which the unruly, unholy brand of politics being increasingly now practised in our country keeps on adding ever more. This is the kind of national angst and paranoia that the writer V.S. Naipaul once characterised as “a thousand mutinies”.
These high-frequency electoral battles — arranged ever so often and so efficiently by the Election Commission of India in every nook and corner of the country — are slowly but surely fraying the very seams of the democratic fabric of the Indian polity. They are beginning to exert enormous fissiparous pressure on the unity of the communities of our peoples everywhere. They keep ordinary people’s nerves on edge all the time, filling them up with either fear or anxiety, rage or outrage over some issue or the other, be it local, regional, parochial or national.
This is not the way to nurture and protect democratic institutions in India —- viz. the ECI , the entire judiciary, the legislatures, the free press —- that are increasingly succumbing to the onslaughts of electoral politics and the venal opportunism it is encouraging in law-making and policy formulation. The Electoral Bonds Scheme legislated and legitimised by Parliament is the most egregious and heinous example of the institutional rot and disease whose roots can be clearly traced to the bizarre multiplicity of elections held in this country. More the number and kind of elections held in this country , the more ravenous becomes the appetite of politicians for money. The more that appetite is whetted, the more competitive elections become. The more competitive that elections become, the more rancorous and malicious they become… This is the viciously evil circle, vortex and whirlpool in which our democratic institutions today are beginning to get sucked into.
We are a nation of 1.3 billion people… about 800 million of whom go to vote. Every time an election is around the corner anywhere and somewhere in the country, politicians and the media make sure they are all driven into a collective paroxysm of rage, fear or aggression. Ordinary people … especially the young impressionable ones then get pushed headlong to plunge into a mood of what the writer V. S.Naipaul once characterised it as “a thousand mutinies”.
This is the sort of mutinous chaos and instability in the democratic experience of India that we even today are able to witness with the Hijab earthquake with its epicentre in Karnataka State having its reverberations felt in the elections underway in far away Uttar Pradesh … In fact, it’s tremendous aftershocks are being felt even in the run up to the Local Body elections that will in three days be upon the entire State of TamilNadu.
For God’s sake and for the sake of the future of India’s Democracy, please let all the wise and sage minds of Indian politics, judiciary, academia and civil society take note of this deteriorating situation in the national polity. Many are the reforms needed in India’s electoral system but none more important and urgent than the one that will usher in the once-in-5-years enactment .
The Modi Government made some perfunctory noises a while ago about this urgent Electoral reform but since then has backtracked and done nothing about it. I will be surprised if in 2024, even if in the unlikely event of the BJP winning national mandate, the party will ever move to enact this particular reform. Why should it when we know it has been the biggest beneficiary of the Electoral Bonds Scheme which pays rich dividends every time an election is held in the country!
For God’s sake and for your own, arise Ye peoples of India, and act now to save your democracy!
Sudarshan Madabushi