Democracies need to be constantly nurtured

No democratic system is ever fully secure. Opposition parties, civil society and the press all have a part to play in the constant struggle to protect democracy, but as independent India’s first generation of leaders showed, the ruling party must lead

There is a great deal of anxiety today about the state of India’s democracy — whether it is in decline, even whether it will survive. There is a sense among those who express these concerns that India’s democracy was established on a firm footing with the inauguration of the Constitution in 1950, and that its elections ran more or less as expected during the Jawaharlal Nehru years in particular.

Free India’s first generation of leaders did not write the Constitution and then sit on their laurels. They remained alert to the way their democratic system was changed as it was put into practice (HT PHOTO)

Democracy, however, is not just about setting up institutions and letting them run; it is a form of everyday discipline among those elected to govern; it is a mode of engaging with Opposition politicians and a modus vivendi shared with fellow citizens, especially those with whom one disagrees. As an everyday practice, democracy has to be constantly guarded against the forces that might jeopardise its working. This was no less true at the dawn of the Republic than it is now. During the Nehru years, too, India’s ruling elites encountered corrupting influences, and fretted about whether democracy could survive. How did they respond?

The first area where Indians were alarmed by how their democracy was operating in the Nehru years was caste. It was widely expected that the experience of elections would loosen the ties of caste affiliation. But very soon after the first general election concluded, and certainly by the end of the second election, it was clear that India’s democracy was feeding caste sentiment.

One particular area of concern was the misuse of votes cast in reserved constituencies. In the first two elections, constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes also elected a representative for a general seat. It was hoped that in this system, candidates for both the reserved and the general seat would have to appeal to all voters, and in so doing, the reservation system would avoid fostering feelings of separateness. In each constituency, voters were given two ballot papers, and they dropped one into a box for their preferred candidates for each seat.

This system of voting was abused in some places in the first two general elections; candidates and their agents convinced some voters to cast the ballot for the general seat but spoil their reserved ballot by dropping it into a general box. Other voters were paid to hide their second ballot so it could be squirrelled out and cast elsewhere illegally. The most prominent person to lose in the first election because of this practice was Dr BR Ambedkar.

India’s first chief election commissioner, Sukumar Sen, worked hard to end these abuses. He urged Members of Parliament (MPs) to adopt a system of marked ballots. To convince MPs that the new system would work, he experimented with marked ballots in byelections, held mock elections, and gave lectures to constituents on how to mark their ballots correctly. His small-scale experiments were a success, and the new ballots were rolled out across the country for the third general election. This was only part of what was regarded at the time as the problem of how India’s democracy fed caste parochialism, but it was one that was successfully addressed by the chief election commissioner.

The second area that concerned India’s elected leaders was the failure of the system of accounting for election expenses. In the first three election campaigns, candidates were permitted to spend ₹25,000 ( ₹35,000 if contesting in a reserved, two-member constituency). After the first election, it was widely recognised that many candidates breached this limit. MPs acknowledged that the requirement to keep track of every paisa spent was tedious and that the accounts filed were ultimately fictitious. The response of Nehru’s government to this problem was not uniform or coherent, and it did change over time.

Through most of the 1950s, there was a relaxed attitude to election expenses. On the one hand, Sen and the Election Commission felt compelled to take a lenient view, declining to enforce rules that would have seen a large number of candidates disqualified. During this decade, the Congress government seemed either unaware of or unwilling to face the threat that money posed to democracy. Indeed, before the second general election, the Congress tried (and failed) to introduce legislation that would have legalised larger expenditures by political parties. At the same time, in this decade, the government included provisions in several laws to make it easier for corporations to donate to political campaigns.

After the second general election, however, the laissez-faire attitude began to fade. It was clear that, in some cases, corporate donations were being exchanged for favours by some ministers in the ruling party. Nehru’s government appointed a committee for the prevention of corruption in 1962. Its chairman, K Santhanam, noted the “widespread impression” that some ministers “enriched themselves illegitimately”, and made recommendations on how to prevent these practices. There were a few resignations from the Union Cabinet, but this did little to eliminate the problem.

The third area of concern was an increasingly intemperate mode of political protest that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, from the virulent demands for Samyukta Maharashtra to the violent campaign to oust the Communist Party in Kerala in 1959. Add to this, riots over language in Assam and communal violence in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and it seemed as if Nehru’s personal efforts to keep the political temperature low were losing ground in the period between the second and third elections.

By the 1960s, Nehru, the Congress and the leaders of the Opposition parties were all fretting about the effects of caste bias, corporate donations, and communal discord on India’s democracy. They responded in two ways. First, codes of conduct emerged as a way to explicitly articulate democratic norms that they hoped to inculcate in citizens and politicians. Codes of conduct were agreed for students, trade unionists and employers, ministers and more. Among political parties, a code of conduct was first agreed after the unrest in Kerala, and then adopted in many other states before the third general election. This would become the basis of today’s model code of conduct.

Second, India’s ruling party led a national conversation about how to improve India’s democracy. In September 1961, a National Integration Conference was held, in which Congress leaders, including President S Radhakrishnan and soon to be vice-president Zakir Husain, acknowledged the role of politicians in producing the threats India’s democracy faced. Discussion in the conference, however, meandered towards improving democratic norms among citizens and deflecting blame from politicians.

Free India’s first generation of leaders did not write the Constitution and then sit on their laurels. They remained alert to the way their democratic system was changed as it was put into practice. They were attentive to the need for India’s democracy to be constantly renewed, though it must be said that their efforts did, at times, came up short.

Was India’s democracy ever secure? Perhaps no democratic system is, for new threats constantly emerge. Opposition parties, civil society and the press all have a part to play in the constant struggle to maintain democracy, but the ruling party must lead.

Taylor C Sherman is professor of History at LSE, and the author of Nehru’s India: A History in Seven MythsThe views expressed are personal