ON 26 November 1949, the Constituent Assembly adopted the Indian Constitution and mandated that it would enter into force from the 26th of January 1950. The Preamble of this document declared the solemn resolve of the Indian people to constitute their nation as a sovereign, democratic republic. The words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ are of recent vintage, inserted by the 42nd Amendment to the Indian Constitution on 18 December 1976.

The democratic system that India adopted was based upon what is colloquially referred to as the Westminster system of government where the Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the Parliament which embodies the sovereign will of the Indian people.

The Westminster model rests on a construct where political parties and individuals compete for space in the Parliament and assemblies on the basis of their programmes and policies. However of late, with the mushrooming of regional and community based parties, religion, caste, muscle and money seem to have displaced the broad ideological architecture that provides the scaffolding for the policy and programme framework.

Political parties in India evolved out of the Indian liberation struggle with the Indian National Congress, from the late 19th to the mid-twentieth century, performing the function of a broad platform. It accommodated the complete spectrum of national opinion cutting across every divide and focused solely on one objective, independence. The only other coherent political organization that emerged during this period was the Communist Party of India, incidentally founded not in India but in Tashkent on 17 October 1920 after the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern). Interestingly there was no political party on the right of the ideological divide at the time. The RSS inspired Jana Sangh, now metamorphosed into the BJP, emerged only in the early 1950s.

It was only after independence when the Indian democratic experiment started unfolding with the first general elections in 1952 that the political party system started acquiring roots in India. The noted historian Ramachandra Guha in his writings describes the process as such: ‘Just before that election, two former cabinet colleagues of Jawaharlal Nehru established political parties to challenge the Congress. One was Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who set up the Jana Sangh, and the other, B.R. Ambedkar, who revived the Scheduled Castes Federation (later named the Republican Party). Neither of these two doctors were, of course, ever members of the Congress itself. However, two more political parties were founded at the same time by lifelong Congressmen who felt compelled to leave their parent organization. One was the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Parishad, whose prime mover was Acharya Kripalani; the other was the Socialist Party, whose leaders included such gifted men as Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan.

‘Shortly before the 1952 elections, these four challengers were joined by a fifth: the Communist Party of India, which came overground at the behest of Moscow, seeking to exchange the "bullet for the ballot". Despite their ideological differences then, the Communists, the Jan Sanghis, the Socialists and the Republicans all believed that Indian democracy would, in course of time, evolve around two poles: one represented by the Congress, the other, hopefully, by themselves. In this they were influenced by the history of western democracies such as the United States of America and the United Kingdom, both marked by a more-or-less stable two-party system.’

 

The evolution of the Indian state coincided with the advent of the Cold War on the global stage. As India for various reasons including, but not limited to, its anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles became increasingly socialist in its predisposition, its political parties too started increasingly organizing themselves structurally and hierarchically on the pattern of similar structures in the socialist world. Unlike political parties in nations that Winston Churchill aptly described in Fulton Falls as ‘outside the ambit of the Iron Curtain’, essentially temporary electoral platforms to put individuals and ideologies in office, parties in the socialist world tended to be permanent and staffed by voluntary or paid whole-timers. This soon became the favoured model across the political spectrum in India also. It is interesting and perhaps the subject matter of some in-depth research whether this model was instinctively or deliberately adopted by almost all serious political formations in the newly liberated nations of Asia and Africa. And if some nations did not do so, then why not?

 

As time and elections merged into a collage between 1952 and 2004, the Indian democratic experience was widely hailed as successful by even naysayers around the world who had initially devoted tomes predicting the imminent demise, dismemberment or balkanization of the Indian nation state. From the windswept chic of Davos to the recently enfranchised black majority of Durban, the ‘Indian phenomena’ inspired the profiteer and the rebel alike. Even we started patting our own backs in appreciation, despite the million mutinies raging from Kashmir to Kalimpong and encompassing the Naxal heartland of Central India.

One crucial aspect which became a casualty in this thunderous crescendo of applause was how the political party system which scaffolds this democratic continuum faring? Between 1952 and 2009, though political outfits continued to mushroom, many of them remained fly-by-night operations structured around an individual/family/caste group, emerging only around elections. At last count there were as many as 730 political parties registered with the Election Commission, excluding the national and state parties. Unfortunately, even in the national and state parties, internal democracy remains more an exception than the rule. In some instances it is wilful while in others the sheer logistics of conducting credible, transparent and fair elections seems to have overwhelmed the intent. In the mid-1990s, the Election Commission of India made a valiant attempt to persuade political parties to follow their respective constitutions in letter and spirit on the pain of de-recognition/ de-registration if they failed to do so. Even as some parties complied, others merely amended their constitutions to formally do away with even the fig leaf of internal democracy that their respective constitutions and memorandums of associations envisaged.

It is thus a piquant situation that the superstructure of the great Indian democratic experience is in the main underpinned by inherently undemocratic, if not totalitarian, political parties.

 

The Indian National Congress held regular organizational elections till the mid-seventies. In the late seventies the Congress split/mutated and by the time the organization, notwithstanding a splendid electoral performance in 1980, settled down, we were already into the middle of the turbulent eighties.

It was a young, charismatic leader, the late Rajiv Gandhi, who made the first attempt to rectify this anomaly. In 1985 he appointed K.N. Joshi as the AICC coordinator for elections and tasked him with the responsibility of conducting the internal elections of the party. With 415 seats in the Lok Sabha and an assembly footprint that commenced at Kellong (Himachal Pradesh) and culminated in Kanyakumari, the Congress organizational prowess was then at its zenith. When membership commenced in 1986, so fierce was the drive that in one district of U.P., the Congress membership was thrice the number of electors registered as voters on the election commission roll in that district. Three powerful factions had each enrolled the total number of voters in that district as primary members of the Congress party. It requires little imagination to discern the genuineness of that membership. Befuddled with such issues, the zeal for organizational elections lost steam and events and competing priorities took over.

Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991. Nevertheless in 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 organizational elections were held in the Congress, from the booth to the national level, under the aegis of a separate central election authority headed by Ram Niwas Mirdha and Oscar Fernandes for the last two elections respectively. In all fairness it must be said that despite logistical constraints, the election process was reasonably credible, transparent and inclusive.

 

In September 2007 when Rahul Gandhi was appointed as General Secretary of the AICC and tasked with the responsibility of mentoring the student and the youth wings of the party – namely the National Students Union of India (NSUI) and the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) – he initiated a wide-ranging process of consultations to road map the way forward for these organizations. One of the problems that he perhaps encountered was how to benchmark the performance of the activists and office bearers of these organizations. Somewhere along the way, he seems to have got a sense that the top-down approach that characterized the appointment processes dating back to 1972 introduced an element of discretion which, even if resulting in good choices, was difficult to explain to those who were disappointed in the selection sweepstakes. Moreover, the fundamental question as to how long non-democratic pillars could support the democratic superstructure of the Indian state too must have factored into these calculations. He decided that without the exhilarating winds of internal democracy it would be difficult to rejuvenate the cloistered environs of these organizations.

 

There was a very successful model that could be emulated. In 1987, the late Rajiv Gandhi had commenced the process of providing constitutional protection to the electoral processes in institutions of local self-government. This culminated in the passage of the 73rd and the 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts on 20 April 1993 that inserted Part IX and IX-A into the Constitution. These parts inter-alia provide for compulsory and regular elections every five years at the lowest tier of the Indian democratic edifice, with provisions of reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and women.

In conjunction with J.M. Lyngdoh’s not for profit organization that goes by the acronym FAME (Forum for Advanced Management of Elections), Rahul Gandhi wisely decided that rather than going whole hog across the country simultaneously, it would be more appropriate to first focus on one state as a pilot for each organization. Accordingly Punjab was chosen for the IYC and Uttaranchal for the NSUI elections respectively.

As a first step the process of membership was opened up. Any student/youth could become a member of the organization he chose to associate with, provided he fulfilled the requisite criterion through e-mail, SMS, paper forms and so on. Membership forms were printed in newspapers which could be cut, filled up and posted along with the requisite membership fee. This was supplemented by vigorous membership drives by opening up membership booths/stalls in the market place, mandis in rural areas, outside colleges and in university premises. As a result of these efforts, membership numbers registered an exponential jump.

The enrolled members were subjected to a rigorous scrutiny process to verify their antecedents. Thereafter, through a transparent draw of lots, elective offices were reserved for SCs, STs, OBCs and women. Elections were held through the process of physical balloting from the booth to the state level in a hierarchically graded process of subordinate committees electing their own leadership and representatives to the next tier of committees. Ultimately a transparent credible, inclusive and verifiable process culminated in more than four thousand young leaders with definitive tenures and defined roles occupying elected offices at various levels of the organization.

 

The pilot has been successful and the march to other states will continue but the larger issue remains. How do we ensure that each and every political party registered with the Election Commission holds regular democratic internal elections? The answer perhaps lies in the process being statutory rather than self-driven, with a separate commission exclusively tasked to fund, conduct, supervise and monitor the internal organizational elections of national and state parties. If this indeed happens, the largest democracy may thus finally have open, vibrant, inclusive and robust structures supporting its superstructure.

 

* The views expressed are personal.