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 If one were to think about the federal democracy of India, in the spirit of Tocqueville, then the current political happenings in Goa are an opportunity for us to examine our democratic practices. Goan politics is exposing once again the limits of our institutional order. By asking hard questions of what is happening, and by taking harder decisions, we may be able to use this phase to strengthen our democracy.

The first question is, of course, to ask why is Goa so often plagued by political instability? Why are parties unable to work out stable coalitions? Is this because of the weakness of the moral culture of the people (as Nehru reportedly said in another context, “Yeh Goa ke lok ajeeb hain”)? How can the political leaders shift sides with such impunity, without significant public protest? And how can they be made more accountable for their behaviour?

To explain this instability brought about by politicians regularly shifting sides in Goa for the last 18 years, we need to recognise that politics today provides the biggest opportunity for rent-taking, to a rising class. Democracy creates a new class of political entrepreneurs for whom rent-taking becomes possible. Through control of the state, these elected representatives are able to enter an informal process of accumulation of capital where their discretionary power, over the structure of rules, gives them the means of accumulation. This is true in all democracies. But in liberal democracies, some checks are in place to limit such activity.

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.

In spite of the 52nd and 91st Amendments, the representatives display the same disregard for the electoral process. They focus, instead, on managing the process so that they can enter the zone of rent taking. When the stakes are high, the tyranny of the representatives reigns supreme, masked as it is by the illusion of parliamentary democracy. It is worth noting that the new coalition — BJP, MGP, UGDP, SGF, one independent and one dissenter — which gives itself the name Goa Democratic Front (Affront?) was on the losing side of the recently held elections.

We have in such politics the parting of ways between ‘the legal’ and ‘the legitimate’, for what maybe legal is certainly not legitimate, since the changes of government through such ‘waka or canoe hopping’ (as they say in New Zealand), diminish the importance of elections in the formation of governments and in making representatives more accountable. The locus of instability has changed slightly in recent years from representatives shifting to now groups shifting to form new coalitions. But the logic remains the same. Acquire power by any means even if it goes against the poll verdict.

Two new possibilities, therefore, need to be considered to make democracy in Goa more robust. The first is to change the electoral system. Perhaps we could have a mixed system. One for big states and one for the small states, where some variant of the proportional representation system, rather than the current first-past-the-post system, would be more appropriate. The capacity of candidates to manage elections through money, threat or manipulation, would thus be diminished. For candidates to aim to get only a majority of votes cast, that is in Goa less than 30 per cent of the electorate when the turnout is 60 per cent, a few thousand at most, is quite easy. They can then auction their candidature producing the resulting political instability. National government must look at such electoral reform.

The second is for the emerging movements to use what has been effectively used in the Philippines, Ukraine, Thailand, and Nepal — the weapon of ‘people’s power’. Let there be a call to peacefully challenge, through people’s power, such illegitimate usurpation of power. Lohia gave such a call against the denial of civil liberties by the Salazarist administration during the liberation movement of Goa. ‘People’s power’ is a weapon of democracy, especially when it is used to restore the legitimacy of the democratic order.

The writer is senior fellow, CSDS, Delhi