2016 May Election Results: A-Satyameva Jayate! Beware Of The Goebbelian Propaganda Of BJP
By DR K S Sharma
27 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org
Democracy in India , so far as people are concerned, comes into effect, once in a while, i.e., on the day of elections. And elections have become anything but democratic with all undemocratic practices involving caste, religion, muscle power, misuse of official machinery etc which play a menacing role. Post-T.N. Seshan, more and more rules and regulations have been made ostensibly to conduct the elections in a free and fair manner. Instead of facilitating, they have created more hurdles and restrictions so far as the political part of campaigning is concerned with so much mandatory requirement to file affidavits, seek written permissions and submit papers, some on a daily basis. One needs to get permissions, many from police too (as they are the real bosses in this police Raj working under an autocratic Centre) , to travel, to hold meetings, to print or paint your slogans etc. So many observers, affidavits, expenditure monitors etc are involved. But all these do not add up to any restrictions on the brazen money power, open and mostly peaceful distribution of cash, liquor, and gifts (like sarees, dhotis, grinder-mixers, rings, ear-rings, cricket-kits and what not) to lure voters, and buy votes. Increasingly, tens of thousands of central armed forces are deployed, more so in select states and seats, to ensure all this in a peaceful manner.
Statutory ceilings on poll expenditure are a mockery, with costs for an Assembly seat going between Rs. 5 to 25 Crore, sometimes touching 50 Crore too. This is an open secret despite so many regulations, accounting and auditing procedures. Affidavits also revealed how the same candidates multiplied their assets within a span of 5 or 10 years. They say the ROR, Rate of Return, is quite high in this business of politics. Besides, now election has become a big commerce, complete with consultancies and Ad agencies taking over propaganda etc. It creates employment to rural as well as urban poor, men and women too, better than NREGS perhaps, ensuring higher wages and spot payment besides biryani, and drinks for those who want them. And media too makes a lot of money in this season and vie to push up their TRP ratings. Even the LEFT Front in Kerala, we are told, hired some Ad agencies to run its campaign! All this Kumbhmela of electioneering adds up to push the GDP, our Finance Minister may claim credit, though it would also accelerate inflation as cynics would argue.
Affidavits , though they are only half-truths, show how a major section of candidates, more so from the ruling class parties, are crore-patis or millionaires, criminals etc. Media reports show how a large section of them are kith and kin of a few hundred families ruling India and states for decades, not to speak of their henchmen and proxies. Like Big Business Houses , we in India have a few hundred Political Houses too which control India and the states as we have been arguing for years. It must be admitted that they are realizing what Dr BR Ambedkar had envisaged way back in his 1943 Speech. He said, as we quoted in earlier article in Countercurrents dated 14 April, 2016 : In the Indian context, he had said, “Parliamentary Democracy, notwithstanding the paraphernalia of a popular government, is in reality a government of a hereditary subject class by a hereditary ruling class.”
Deposit money for a candidate had been steeply enhanced at a time some years ago, from Rs 500 and Rs 250, to Rs.25000 for Lok Sabha and Rs 10000 for Assembly seats. 50 percent concession is given to SCs STs. How many people in this country can lavish such an amount knowing full well that moneybags would outwit them anyway in this gamble? This measure was taken ostensibly to reduce if not eliminate what they call as non-serious candidates. This measure in practice virtually eliminates most of the poor from the contest. Those millionaires and criminals in the fray are deemed as serious candidates. For various reasons, the ruling class elements file thousands of dummy candidates as independents as well as from fake parties (we are not referring to political forces and small parties with their own politics) who are all supposed to be serious candidates. In Tamilnadu, for instance, there were 90 parties in the fray in the current election as per official data of the Election Commission. In Bengal 54 parties contested, and around 40 each in Kerala and Assam.
Notwithstanding all this fraud in the name of democracy, the media projects it all in terms of people’s mandate and verdicts, spiced up with pre-poll and post-poll surveys and guesstimates. Many surveys as well as news stories are planted and paid for, it is well-known by now. We are not going more into such basically undemocratic practices. Here we are only confining to the numbers game which they say is a decisive part of electoral democracy. We are not presently going into the respective politics of various parties including the Left.
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Election reviews by the ruling parties, presently the BJP at the centre, and by political and media pundits are mostly inobjective. They conceal more, rather than reveal the fraud. It is more misinformation than information enabled by IT, ITES, Facebook and faceless bookies indulging on betting on who wins and who loses and by what margin. Going by most analyses, it is as if the BJP is in the top-gear marching ahead towards its goal of “Congress-mukt Bharat”. It is not only the so-called the winner-BJP but, curiously, even the loser-Congress and other parties who harp on those lines.
The “winner takes all” system, or the First past the post (FPTP) system, is such a devastating menace that it robs any semblance of democracy that is claimed. Here below are given some figures that are revealing in this regard. We are ignoring Puduchery in view of its very limited electorate of only a few lakh votes. We are presently not going into a political reading of the results, about which lot has appeared in the media.
(1) We are told Congress is eliminated in this election. What do the figures tell ? Out of 792 Assembly seats involved in these four states (Assam, Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu), Congress got 100, and BJP 65. If you add up their allies, “Congress Plus” got 215 (DMK 89, IUML-20, Kerala Congress -6), whereas “BJP plus” got 90, or about 11% of all seats, compared to 27% seats by Congress and its allies.
(2) In these four states, the BJP in all polled around 139 Lakh votes, compared to 195 Lakh by Congress. In NONE of the four States BJP alone polled more votes than Congress alone.
(3) The percentage of votes polled by Congress is more than that by BJP, including, paradoxically but not uncommonly, in Assam where BJP is the head of the winning combination: Congress polled 31%, compared to BJP’s 29.5%. In Bengal Congress got 12.37, BJP 10.2. In Kerala 23.7 Vs 10.5, and in Tamil Nadu it is 6.4 and 2.8.
(4) BJP winning one seat in Kerala is shown as a big trophy; so also the three seats in Bengal it won. That it won nil in Tamil Nadu is underplayed.
(5) An analyst pointed out that in these four states, BJP had won or topped in 104 seats or segments out of 590 it had contested in 2014 polls. Now they are confined to 64 out of 661 they contested. Whereas Congress contested 749 and won 110 in 2014; now it is 100 out of 344. In both Bengal and Kerala, BJP won (or topped) in less number of Assembly seats (or segments) now compared to its performance in 2014 Loksabha elections. In Bengal, BJP score in 2014 was 24, now reduced to just 3. In Kerala it topped in 4 seats in 2014, now only one. In Tamilnadu BJP led in 7 then, now zero. Overall vote share of BJP in these four states was 17 percent in 2014, now 13. All this despite their contesting more seats now than in 2014. So much about their marching ahead.
(6) The “Left” parties, written off as outdated by the whole world, so we are told by political and media pundits, have been rejected, save for the Kerala’s routine way of swapping UDF and LDF alternately. But numbers tell otherwise. With so many freebies ranging from bicycles to laptops, and even an unemployment allowance (of Rs.1500 per month being implemented in Bengal to about one lakh people, whatever the criteria), Jayalalita’s AIADMK and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress are said to be sort of “Left” populist parties, more “Left” than the others. Notwithstanding such interpretations, the Left parties in this current round won 114 (plus 6 Independents) seats compared to BJP’s 64 (plus 26 allies), and Congress’ 100 (plus 26 excluding DMK) seats. Even CPM alone got 84 compared to BJP’s 64. The Left parties polled around 224 lakh votes in all compared to 139 of BJP and 195 of Congress. One can’t say, for sure, they are written off by the electorate!
(7) The regional parties that did not go either with Congress or BJP this time won 358 seats, more than the combined figure (305) of Congress and BJP. These parties polled about 483 lakh votes, ie., more than the combined vote (334 lakh) of Congress and BJP, the so-called all-India parties. (AIADMK – 176 Lakh, Trinamul Congress 245 Lakh, AIUDF – 22 Lakh. DMK, 23, DMDK – 10, MDMK 3.7, VCK 3.3 etc). Even seats-wise, they got 35% seats, i.e., more than the combined seats won by Congress, BJP, and allies of both of them. Together, allies included, they got only 38% of all seats. 62% went to others.
(8) These parties are known to be weather-cocks who had sailed with both Congress and BJP in the past. So they can’t be counted in terms of communalism Vs secularism (though the latter is most often soft Hindutva). The Congress is accused of appeasement of Muslim minorities, but if it had sailed with AIUDF of Assam – which is not implausible – BJP would have lost Assam too, as both the votes and voting percentages show (BP-AGP-BDF alliance got 70.4 Lakh votes , whereas Congress (52.4) and AIUDF (22), if combined, would have got 74.4. We are not going into why Congress avoided its alleged appeasement politics.
(9) Thus, in terms of total seats, total votes, or percentage of seats or votes, in none of these parameters BJP got more, not even when seen together with its allies. However, they claim victory, a People’s mandate for “development policies and vision” of Modi. This is patently false.
(10) Times Group media highlighted, with maps etc, statistics that BJP-ruled states now represent about 35.57% of India’s population, compared to only 7% represented by Congress. Obviously, together they cover only 43% of population, while others represent 57%.
(11) BJP, its governments and the related media are spreading falsehood. Goebbelian propaganda tops the media. The media overwhelmingly facilitates this. A-SATYAMEYA JAYATE! It seems more appropriate to them. Fickle-minded secularists also blindly aid them in spreading these false claims.
(12) Added to all the fraud that goes in the name of India’s democracy, this system of FPTP system, based on disproportionate representation, distorts whatever sanctity is left of so-called people’s mandate. It is one electoral reform that ruling classes and their parties never accepted. They have been enjoying its fruits. Almost never in India’s electoral history, these parties have ever got 50% of polled vote. The only exception was in 1985 when Mrs. Indira Gandhi was murdered. Congress then just scraped through with 50%. Modi’s BJP with its 31% of polled vote in 2014 (or a little over 20% of the total electorate) claims the people’s mandate for its divisive and fascist ways! Hitler had only one Goebbels, Modi is much ahead with, we don’t know how many.
(This is a modified and slightly enlarged version in English of a brief comment by Dr.K S Sharma in Kannada.)
Dr KS Sharma, a Retired Professor of Law based at Hubli, Karnataka, has been a leader of working class for over 45 years now, focused on unorganized labor, and as Founder- President of Karnataka State Govt. Dailywage Employees Federation, successfully organized one lakh dailywagers of Govt of Karnataka who got regularized after 30 years of struggle that included street battles and legal battles going upto Supreme Court. He is a great teacher, poet, writer, dramatist, literary critic, columnist,publisher, orator, and an activist–social scientist who was a Vice-President of ISSA , Indian Social Science Academy, for sometime. He is the Founder President of a group of Institutions including an ITI, Institute of Naturopathy and Yoga, Dr. Da Ra Bendre (Jnana Peeth Awardee) Research Institute, Indian Institute of Marxist Theory and Practice, FMRRC- Fluorosis Mitigation Research and Resource Centre all located in Vishwa Shrama Chetana campus, Hubli. He may be contacted at : [email protected]