Democracy Or Sham ?
By Jagdish Keshav
06 March, 2009
The Verdict
In the very recent past I was a witness to a program on a leading TV channel where people who had accomplished some great things for themselves and who had immensely contributed to our nation were honoured. Deservingly so indeed !
Among the group were these highly motivated and dedicated professionals who not only revolutionized an election process with their honesty but won laurels all over the world including the UN for the efficient process they brought about.
I am talking the past and the present Election Commissioners of India. They certainly have done a great job for the democratic process to be kept alive in such a huge and diverse country like ours.
They truly deserved the honours bestowed upon them.
No doubt any election in any country is not an easy task to handle. Be it the US or India it calls for an enormous amount of manpower and dedication to make certain the procedure is clean and smooth.
Of course it isn’t always 100 per cent successful every time. Take the case of the first Presidential election of GW Bush, the son. There were widespread malpractices in Florida State that resulted in hundreds of thousands of voters disenfranchised. Here the election officials did not receive all the blame for this huge mishap. It turned out to be political ploy that brought about this disastrous end and the result that followed. Guess who won the election and moved from his ranch in Texas to the White House ?!.
Here in our country too we have witnessed in the past elections rigged, poll centres vandalized, voting boxes stolen and people voting with fake identities.
Many things changed with Electronic Voting Machines coming into the picture and proceedings have been more streamlined, all thanks mainly to these Commissioners & Officials in-charge of such a huge exercise.
Here is what I feel. With all the success and honesty of these officials, who are we electing? Having acknowledged the procedure adopted by the Election Commission as truly noteworthy, the story of the candidates is something else.
Most of the politicians as we know are corrupt and are crooks. There are thousands of Madhu Kodas spread across and I am not just talking about India alone.
But staying with our great country of ours, a Madhu Koda gets elected too by going through the same honest procedures conducted by honest officials who do their duties as per the books and have gone beyond too to implement such a process.
Fine, it is a great process, elections are fair, democracy is alive and kicking but who are the real beneficiaries of all these rigmaroles? It is these crooks in the garb of the politicians of course!
According to a very recent article in the media, it was mentioned that almost all of the ruling politicians in Goa are involved in illegal mining! And these people got elected too by the same democratic process.
At this point it may be immaterial to name the names of the politicians or their clans who have taken advantage of a process which wasn’t much honest in the past but now is, all thanks to these officials from the Election Commission. There are just too many of them.
One big hurdle the public face is the absence of checks, balances and accountability of these elected politicians.
So to compliment these fair elections a new process where-in anyone who wishes to occupy a high political office must be forced to go through a scanner of sorts (like the new body scanners at airports!) to make certain that he or she is clean. Every bit their history must be thoroughly scrutinized to record their ‘cleanliness’ in public life.
Clean of past or intended corrupt practices.
Only then perhaps we shall reap the fruits of a democracy and the beneficiaries will be the Aam Admi for a change and not these crooks.
Till then I guess it is suffice to state that all the hard work of the Commissioners & others at the Election Commission is only a part success!..
