I got an email from a senior friend in Assam. ‘Can we get the courts to intervene in preventing the annual devastation by floods?‘ He wrote with some hesitation, unsure of the forum and the likely outcome. Others, who approach me almost every other day, suffer from no such hesitation or doubt. They are sure that the country would be saved if only Prashant Bhushan could approach the court with a petition against the Agnipath scheme, wheat export or ban on its export, or what have you. Mostly the causes are dear to my heart, but I am not clear why they think the problem or the solution lies in the law. This is the price you pay for being friends with Prashant Bhushan, I tell myself, as I forward a few requests to him every week. I have noticed a special category for these requests. These are my friends who want to reform India’s politics through legal intervention. In the 1960s through 80s, it used to be a plea to shift from the current first-past-the-post system to an electoral system of proportional representation.
As electoral reforms gained center stage, thanks to the Election Commission under T. N. Seshan amplifying these voices, the demands also grew: let us discourage ‘non- serious candidates’ from entering the electoral fray, let us prevent fragmentation of the verdict, let us stop criminals and corrupt leaders from being elected. Every now and then something new gets added to this list: let us prohibit any caste or communal appeal in elections, let us make election campaign promises legally binding, and so on. Every time I hear such a proposal, I remember the joke about the man searching for his lost keys under a lamppost. When asked ‘Where did you drop the keys?’ he points to a distant spot in the dark. ‘But then why are you looking for it here, under the lamp?’. ‘Because there is light here,’ he responds, innocently. Those who demand legal, judicial, or institutional solutions to the ills of politics are often as clueless as that man. Or worse, as many of these interventions seek to privilege elite concerns over ordinary peoples’ needs and aspirations in a democracy. Way back in 1996, I wrote a nasty article on thinking about electoral reforms “beyond middle-class fantasies” (Seminar, No. 440, April 1996). Nothing changed, except that I lost the sympathy of a few friends. Later I wrote a more sober and longer version trying to spell out the what, why, and how of political reforms. But nothing has diminished the enthusiasm of those who want a final solution to all the political ills of the country through some legal solution or the other.
We are a nation in search of a magical potion. We are in such a hurry that we don’t have the time to see if the disease exists and if it needs the kind of cure we are looking for. We are so desperate that we can’t waste time checking the healer or the medicine. We want Pekka solutions, here and now. The latest in this saga is the plea to get the Supreme Court to stop political parties from promising or distributing “irrational freebies” during the election campaign. Or else, the Election Commission should take away their election symbol. The quality of the petition and the character of the petitioner need not detain us here. Suffice to say that Ashwini Upadhyay, a lawyer, and a small-time BJP leader, has been in the news for many wrong reasons, including allegations of spreading communal hatred. Let us also not focus on the oddity of the Supreme Court, which has found no time electoral bonds case directly linked to political reforms, spending its precious time on such a petition. As per news reports, a bench led by CJI N.V. Ramana has asked the Union government to “take a stand” on whether freebies should continue or not and has fixed the next hearing for 3 August.
