The delights of democracy

The delights of democracy
T.V.R. Shenoy

``Can we count them with our nose?/Can we count them with our toes?/Should we count them with a band?/Should we count them all by hand?/If I do not like the count,/I will simply throw them out!''

I HAVE heard a lot about the wonders of the Internet; here is one of the downsides -- having seven people send me the same joke in the space of two hours. The presidential election in the United States has spawned a cottage industry in bad quips. Fair enough -- which of us would not laugh if the richest man on earth slipped on a banana peel in the market?

All right, take a couple of minutes to snigger at those poor benighted Americans. But will someone then pick up that wretched peel if only to ensure that one of us isn't the next to slip? By which I mean, pray let us examine just where the Americans went wrong and how we would stand the comparison.

Let us hear the first charge against the American system: that a president of the United States can make it to the White House even if his rivals get more votes. Granted, this is not democracy at its finest. But wait a minute, what right do we Indians have to snigger at this?

Can you name any ministry, just one, that came to power with an absolute majority of the votes? Everybody knows Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress (I) to power in 1984, taking three-quarters of the seats in the Lok Sabha. How many people remember that that historic majority rested on less than 50 per cent of the votes polled? (If I remember correctly, it was a little over 48 per cent.) The simple fact is that no government in modern India -- Jawaharlal Nehru's in 1957, Indira Gandhi's in 1971, or any other -- came to power with a clear mandate.

There have been 25 presidential elections in the United States in this century, beginning in 1904 and ending in 2000. There have been only eight occasions -- including the ongoing mess -- where a candidate made it through without winning 50 per cent of the votes cast. In other words, two of every three polls saw a candidate winning a clear mandate.

So let us look at those sums again. The United States has a success rate of 68 per cent, while India gets a zero. Who should be laughing at whom?

What is the second charge against the American system? Critics point out that the bitter wrangling over the Florida results is because of the `winner take all' system. (In the United States, a candidate scoops all the electoral college votes from a state even if the difference in the popular vote is in single figures.)

It goes without saying that this is unfair. But how is it different from what we experience in every general election? We too have a `first past the post' system, the sole difference being that we spread it out over 543 Lok Sabha constituencies rather than 50 states. But does that make it less unfair? Or less undemocratic? I would say that honours -- or dishonours -- are about even between India and the United States on this score.

What is the third charge levelled against the American system? Well, everyone is sniggering over the fact that nobody knows who has won the election though it has been well over a fortnight since the actual voting took place.

I have two points that I would like to make on this. First, given that our own electoral process took a month or more from the start of voting to the announcement of results, I am not sure that we Indians have cause to look down upon the United States. Second, and here we touch the nub, every voter in the United States was making a conscious decision to choose the country's chief executive.

Let me touch on this a little longer since this is a pet peeve. In 1997, British voters knew that the prime minister would be either John Major or Tony Blair. German voters in the last polls had a clear choice for Helmut Kohl or Gerhard Schroder as chancellor. Two weeks ago, tens of millions of Americans opted for either Al Gore or George Bush. Please tell me which of us opted for H.D. Deve Gowda in 1996 or Inder Kumar Gujral in 1987?

We think it hilarious that a presidential election in the world's second largest democracy should be settled on the basis of a thousand votes. Let us be honest: were there even as many as a thousand people who actually voted for a Deve Gowda government when they stood in line to cast their ballots in 1996?

The usual excuse is that members of Parliament should elect their leader. This is both undemocratic and a deliberate attempt to evade the truth. It is undemocratic because it is the voters who should select their leader. It is deceitful because these decisions are made behind closed doors. The average legislator in 1996 had no idea what was going on; worse, many of the so-called leaders were men who lacked the guts to stand for election. Going back to 1996, precisely which constituency did the likes of Harkishen Singh Surjeet, Sitaram Yechury, or Prakash Karat represent?

There may be some countries which have created a perfect electoral system. If so, their citizens are entitled to snigger at the United States. We cannot enjoy that privilege.

Let us be honest: the American system is as representative as our own, probably more so. Of course, there is scope for improvement, and the United States, as leader of the free world, should ensure the system continues to evolve. Biometrics could be used to ensure that electoral fraud becomes rarer, the Internet might be used to cast votes, and so on. (Did you know that biometric methods of identification are being developed in Bangalore?)

But technology can do only so much. It is useful in cleansing the system; it will not lessen the unfairness of the `winner take all' system and it will not give us, ordinary voters, a voice in choosing a chief executive. We require more fundamental reforms than computers can provide; laughing at the United States and patting ourselves on the back does not help.

To end on a happy note, there is one area where India is definitely superior: we do not, unlike the voters of Missouri, deliberately elect a dead man to office!