India's biggest festival

Among all the magical things that happen in India, none has the majesty of its general elections. The exercise is unique, not just for the sheer scale (over 700 million voters, with the number of voting booths, voting machines and election officials all counted in six- or seven-digit numbers), but also for the variety. There are big states (the six biggest account for nearly 300 seats in the Lok Sabha) and small ones (the eight smallest have 13 seats between them, apart from seven Union Territories with another 13 seats), representing all the colours of every political rainbow imaginable. There are parties that appeal to caste and religious identity, cadre-based parties with ideological moorings and those that are the extension of a single individual’s personality. There is dynastic leadership as well as the emergence of grassroot leaders from nowhere. The elections are the most heterogeneous, cacophonic, vibrant assertion possible of the right to choose your rulers—unique also because the poor vote more than the well-to-do. More than anything else, they know that political will trumps economic power, and that politics is the way to get some benefits to reach those at the bottom of the pyramid. And so it is that no country in an even remotely comparable position has anything like the history of India’s elections. The one that has just been announced is for the 15th Lok Sabha, and takes place 57 years after the first such exercise in a mostly unlettered country where life expectancy was barely 32 years! That such a history can exist at all is therefore a triumphant defiance of many probabilities.

As with all human endeavour that takes in such multitudes, everything is on display—good and bad, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong. And so there are plenty of people with criminal records who will be in the fray (some fighting from behind jail bars), and many of them will win. If the past experience is anything to go by, the majority of candidates will spend far more than the limits placed on campaign expenditure—evasion made easy by some large loopholes in the way the law has been framed. But it is not just big spending that happens in Indian politics, which can be a lucrative pathway to riches too. The disclosures that are now mandatory with regard to candidates’ wealth has made it clear that most politicians are now crorepatis. That may not mean quite so much as it did once, given inflation and the boom in real estate prices (much the preferred form of investment for the political class, for more reasons than one), but it is evident that those who seek your vote are mostly wealthy people who speak in the name of the poor, while the deals are done by the rich. Also, lest it be forgotten, the history of the 14th Lok Sabha shows that Parliament sits on fewer days than in the past, that far too much time is wasted through entirely avoidable disruptions, and that even important Bills are passed without debate in the House.

But imperfect as it is, and despite the endless debate about whether India’s politics without boundaries has come in the way of the country achieving more in the area of social development and economic growth, the fact is that no other system will work for India. There are those who argue in favour of a presidential system, not realising that it would be extreme folly to centralise power in a country that needs more democratic decentralisation, not less. And so, over the next 10 weeks of choosing candidates, campaigning, voting and counting, until D-day on May 16 when another page in India’s democratic history will have been written, be witness to one of the grandest spectacles that this country is blessed enough to witness every five years.