This is a big challenge in India since the checks are weak and all politicians are implicated. There is little political courage to make the checks more forceful, although initiatives such as right to information are slowly moving the polity in this direction. In Goa the situation is particularly pernicious since it has become the investment destination for the surplus capital of the class that today belongs to India Shining. This investment is primarily in land as a result of which a land mafia has emerged. The stakes are high — so high that public morality has ceased to be an issue. The political economy of land is clearly distorting the institutions and practices of democracy.

The first such distortion relates to the tyranny of the representatives. Through the politics of defection, that Goa has witnessed these 18 years, a tyranny of the representatives has emerged where, irrespective of the outcome of elections, representatives from different groups make and change governments at will. The villains are the same. The electoral verdict is of no consequence. In 1989 Churchill Alemao’s defection reduced the Congress to a minority. Yet he continued in and out of the Congress. In 2005 Atanasio Monseratte brought down the BJP government of Parrikar. At that time L.K. Advani called it the ‘murder of democracy’. In 2007 the same Monseratte has joined hands with the same Parrikar! In all these shenanigans the people can only vote, shut up, and obey, as Schumpeter suggested in his magisterial work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

... contd.