Indians run to elect new govt as democracy limps

New Delhi.
It is reputed as the world’s largest democracy and the 814.5 million registered voters present the highest number in any country. India has a total population of some 1.3 billion people that occupy the vast Asian Sub-Continent.
Politics is serious business in this country and this year’s election will be the longest in its history running from this Monday until May 12, in nine different rounds will result in the constitution of a new Lok Sabha (Lower House of Parliament) a surprisingly low number of representatives of only 543 members given the more than a billion people represented.

The Upper House known as the Rajya Sabha (Council of States) sits 250 members elected by state councils which send 238 members and the balance of 12 members is nominated by the president to represent, art, literature, social services and science.

In a country where extreme poverty lives side by side with extreme wealth, campaigns were in full gear well before March intensifying towards the start of polling.

Reports in local media and interviews with civil society actors point to traditional challenges of democracy typical to most developing countries. An elderly lady at a Panchayat (lowest administration level) in Rajasamand district in Rajasthan told me, the biggest challenge is that the politicians surface during election time after which they disappear only to return five years later to seek re-election.

“We can’t reach them to register our concerns,” the woman responded to my question on why some of their concerns cannot be channeled through elected representatives, “we last saw our MP during elections (in April/May 2009) we will see him again seeking for re-election.”

Some 16 political parties are participating in the election but less than five have sped ahead of the pack to a commanding lead. Many are working in alliance.

The incumbent Indian National Congress is facing stiff challenge from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) whose leader, Narendra Modi is fancied to become the next Prime Minister.

164 out 543 MPs have criminal issues
Going into the election, India faces challenges of political corruption and a very poor electorate. Politicians are offering alcohol to the electorate to prize away their vote.

However, questions of integrity blight the processes as a recent survey found that out of 543 members of the Lok Sabha, some 164 have criminal issues pending, some as serious as murder, kidnap and extortion.
A local NGO Parliament legislative research (PRS), that tracks MPs performance in the Lok Sabha through a score card tracking system found attendance and participation as law as zero for some of the most senior members of the lower house.

Some of the information is gleaned off declarations made by MPs themselves that requires they indicate their assets and liabilities, and whether they have any criminal liability.

But here is also a country, where though poor, a reasonable portion of the population is aware of its rights. For nearly 30 years, a grassroots group, The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (Association for the Empowerment of Workers and Peasants)-MKSS started a campaign to force government become more open.

The campaign resulted in a Right to Information Law (RTI) passed in 2005 (same time as Uganda passed its own Access to Information Act) and the law is turning tables as government is being asked to release information from as basic as food rations allocations, reasons for transfer or failure to promote a government worker to as high level as multimillion dollar scams by government officials.

Mr Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, a transnational NGO headquartered in Delhi says the RTI is turning tables in politics, governance and administration in India.

In nine years since the law was passed, some four million applications have been filed seeking information that is now playing a critical role in feeding the populace and clean government campaigners raise questions against candidates and the political process.

Dr S.K. Sarkar, a cabinet secretary in the Ministry of Personnel, says the government has taken an information access route rather than denial to empower ordinary people to hold government to account.

In a government where officials are keener to hide information rather than share it, an attitude for giving rather than overreliance on exemption has seen an interestingly increasing number of previously unanticipated users—government workers themselves and retiring officials keen to understand why one is transferred before the lapse of normal transfer schedules, a missed promotion and where a political heavy weight has pushed for punishment or promotion of an individual.

Prof Shekar Singh, an academic and activist for the right to information says the law is helping put politics more in line.
A major debate going on in India at the moment is whether political parties should be treated as public entities which would put them under the purview of the RTI.
In the elections this month, the question of party accountability is key.

millions trapped in poverty
While India may boast of a patch among the world’s 10 largest economies and a transition from an under developed to the developing economic scale of economic ranking, obscene poverty in many parts of the country and among hundreds of millions of its people blight the flashy glass towers and wide boulevards of New Delhi, Mumbai and the other major cities in the vast country.

Hundreds of millions remain trapped in abject poverty and according to sources here, to keep good global image, government has been playing games with methods of calculating who falls below the poverty line in a bid to have better statistical presentations but the reality remains grim.