Horse Trading
One of South Asia’s problems is the ridiculous claim that our democracy is moulded according to the “genius of the people” while in actual fact it is an imperfect electoral exercise that is copied from western models with very little relevance to the local environment. This type of democracy bedevils good governance, particularly because the low rate of literacy provides opportunity for a high rate of malfeasance. The voters in India having given a mixed verdict, parties and individuals in a “hung Parliament” have been engaged in compromising ethical principles in the scramble to acquire the seat of power. The commonly used term for this ambiguous post-electoral exercise is “horse-trading” and except in Sri Lanka, which delivered a complete mandate for change, things are the same in Pakistan, Nepal, India and in the near future will most probably be the same in Bangladesh. With every passing election, the verdict of the electorate is increasingly being blatantly corrupted, with a commensurate loss of public confidence in the electoral process. The crossing of the ideological floor is not confined to post-election power plays only, candidates and parties now search for each other pre-election to determine the best electoral winning combination. One begins to wonder whether a commitment to any party line can survive serving the motivated interests of one’s personal self, materially more important than ideology.
A hung Parliament sets in motion forces that are morally repugnant to the exercise of the free vote. To attain a majority Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP government is now engaged in a scramble to influence smaller parties and individuals, who on their part want a binding commitment from the would-be suitors for their special interests or more directly, money and lots of it. This democratic farce of “horse-trading”, is not confined to India or South Asia but is a common practice in most third world countries. Accountability, which is at the heart of the democratic process, is lost at the very outset when stepping into the governance mode. Having violated ethical principles and compromised on election promises to accommodate potential allies in reaching for power, the incumbents are ill-suited as responsible mentors of any exercise in accountability. The result is that increasingly governments rely on the rewards of corruption for survival. In some countries it has become a socially acceptable thing to be blatantly corrupt i.e. the Marcos Syndrome where the rulers brazenly flaunt illegal wealth knowing that a significant part of the gullible public will keep on believing their denials about corruption. Faced with retribution in various forms if they do not conform, senior government functionaries are now finding it more profitable to join in with the loot, some even falling over themselves to ingratiate themselves with the political rulers by teaching them how to increase their looting of the public till while carefully skirting around the laws of the land. A democracy without accountability is akin to dictatorship, a dictatorship that does not compromise on nepotism and corruption would then logically be better than such a democracy. Given that dictatorship almost never accepts accountability about itself, the whole thing slides into a Catch-22 situation.
