Yadav A radical agenda for political reforms - Democracy Asia

A radical agenda for political reformsYOGENDRA YADAVIS there a radical agenda for politicalreforms in contemporary India? Doespolitics of social transformation have areadily available checklist of what needs tobe done in the sphere of political institutionsand practices? Or, at the very least, does ithave a robust sense of the direction in whichto move? I wish to suggest that such anagenda is not available, even in the minimalsense of the term.The present essay begins by defending thissuggestion and exploring why we findourselves in such a sorry state. The latterhalf of the essay is an attempt to fill this gap.It offers some thoughts on how to go aboutconstructing such an agenda, or perhaps onhow not to think about political reforms. Theessay concludes by separating what I call the‘old’ and the ‘new’ arenas of politicalreforms and offering a rough checklist ofwhat needs to be done in each of these. Theprinciple ambition that underlines thisenterprise is to rehabilitate politicalcommonsense as an appropriate mode ofthinking about political reform.We begin to get a sense of the absence of aradical agenda on political reforms bycontrasting it with the radical agenda on theeconomy. The latter is in no great shapetoday. The last decade has certainly shakenthe radicals out of the complacent belief thatthis agenda will be realised for them by abenign movement of history. The agendaseems to be fast disappearing from thehorizon of realisable dreams. Its empiricalassumptions and institutional expression areincreasingly under serious dispute. It turns

out that some of the critical details of thisagenda were never clearly worked out.Yet there is a sense in which we stillpossess a radical economic agenda: there aresome guiding values, a sense of the directionto move towards and a shared understandingof what to welcome and what to resist. Asimilar focus on the social andenvironmental question would also bring outthe existence of such an agenda,notwithstanding all the attendantcomplications.One could argue similarly that there is aradical political agenda which radicalpolitical mobilisation must aim at. But nosuch agenda is available to us on thequestion of reforming the institutionaldesign and practices of politics so as toimprove the chances of politics yieldingwhatever we expect of it. It is unclear as towhat the radicals should stand for in thisrealm.It is not uncommon for practitioners tospeak as if everyone knows what needs to bedone. But efforts at spelling it out rarely gobeyond the facile consensus of a drawingroom conversation: that there is somethingradically wrong with the national enterprise,that politics is at the heart of our ills and thatit must be reformed to resurrect the wonderthat could be India. There could beagreement on some isolated items –appointing a lokpal or state funding ofelections. But the various items do not fitinto an integral whole that displays someinternal coherence, nor is there a hierarchyof significance at work in such thinking. Inthis sense there is no radical agenda forpolitical reforms in contemporary India.

There is nothing new about this absence.The current mismatch between thesignificance attached to political reformsand the cognitive attention paid to it is hascharacterised this subject right from thebeginning. Thinking about political reformshas been seriously debilitated from twodirections in post-independence India. Themainstream or establishment thinking hasbeen caught in the prison-house of realism.A fascination with the new Constitution andthe entire gamut of constitutional practicesprevented mainstream thinking from goingbeyond considerations of minor tinkeringwith the legal-constitutional frame. Therewas a latent anxiety, no doubt, about theinability of Indian democracy to attain the‘correct’ form of western democraticinstitutions – the non-emergence of a twopartysystem, the non-correspondencebetween the Indian Parliament andWestminster, and so on.It must have been depressing for them, forthe establishment did believe in whatRoberto Unger has described as‘institutional fetishism’, the idea thatpolitical values have a unique, single andnecessary institutional expression. In apostcolonial setting institutional fetishismmixed with an awe of the West produced aset of cognitive and practical impediments tothinking about political institutions. But thisanxiety did not result in a comprehensive setof proposals to reform the polity.The critics of the establishment too, on theother hand, never thought carefully aboutpolitical reforms. For left-wing critics, theword ‘reform’ always carried a tinge ofsuspicion, the fear of being caught in areformist trap. In their worldview it madelittle sense to think about reforming the

existing political design, for they aimed atnothing less than a complete overhaul,nothing short of revolution. The trouble wasthat the political design of the postrevolutionarystate was never attended tobeyond some vague and poetic gestures inMarx’s writings. There was little attentionpaid to how the political institutions of thefuture would relate to the existing gamut ofsocial and political institutions in a societylike India. Thinking about these subjects,like so much else, was relegated to the ‘lastinstance’ that never arrived.At the other end of the spectrum of thecritics of liberal democratic set-up, theGandhians too shared the communists’temptation to write on a clean slate.Shrimannarayan’s alternative constitutionfor independent India was not quite aproposal for political reform. It was analternative design for a new polity. PerhapsJP’s ‘A plea for the reconstruction for theIndian polity’ was the only comprehensiveset of proposals for radical political reform.In retrospect his critique looks ahead of histime. It is striking how many of the ills ofour political system were seen by him in aclimate much less conducive to discussingsuch issues.Unlike other reformists of his time, JP didnot lack in bold imagination. What heperhaps did lack was realism, not in thesense of being non-practical and unfeasiblebut in the deeper sense of not connecting tosociological reality, of being insufficientlygrounded in a sense of power and causalityof everyday life. The village community onwhich JP rested his entire communitarianmodel may have never existed. Like thecommunists, JP was unwilling to spell out

his model in relation to the existing gamut ofmodern political institutions and practices.In that sense the Lohia-socialists weresomething of an exception. Lohia’s vision ofa chaukhamba raj or a four pillar state, wasa much less radical departure from theexisting institutions than was the case withhis other radical contemporaries. His pleafor the centre, state, district and village levelgovernments as the four-pillars of adecentralized state structure anticipatesmuch of the discussion on politicaldecentralisation in the 1990s. But, like somany of his ideas, his proposals remained inthe realm of broad gestures that were neverworked out.The challenge of thinking about politicalreform fell between the two stools ofconservative constitutionalism and itsvisionary critiques. Political reforms came tobe an area where our convictions wereinsufficiently grounded and even lesssufficiently worked out. Something of across between these two tendencies alsoaccounts for the commonsense on politicalreforms that developed between theseventies and the nineties. Thiscommonsense was first articulated in thearena of electoral reforms by the TarkundeCommittee and then in documents like AnAgenda for India (Seminar 245 & 251,January and July 1980), the DineshGoswami report on electoral reforms and thewritings of L.P. Singh and S.L. Shakdher(see Sanjay Mishra’s article in this issue).All these efforts created something of aconsensus on at least some familiar items ofpolitical reforms: thinking about aproportional or mixed electoral system as asubstitute for the first-past-the-post system,

anti-defection law, the institution of a lokpaland state funding of elections. More thanthese specific items, the commonsense alsodefined some basic attributes of thedominant thinking about political reforms.Like the establishment and therevolutionaries, the reformers also focusedon institutions of high national politics: thenational legislature and the executive. Theobjectives of reform were still quitegeneralized: to clear the system of corruptpractices and to ensure free and fairelections. The favoured instrument ofpolitical reforms was legal-constitutionalchange. At the same time it was recognisedthat these changes needed to be backed bypolitical action.The last decade has changed all that. Thequestion of political reform has neverenjoyed as much public attention as it did inthe last decade. Greater public attention andpriority to political reforms did not howeverproduce a radical agenda for politicalreforms. On the contrary, there has been aclear shift to a conservative agenda onpolitical reforms. To be sure this shift is nota direct outcome of the rise of the BJPduring the same period; the newconservative agenda is not communal. Yetthe rise of the political right makes itpossible to articulate positions that wereimpermissible earlier.The change in India cannot also be directlylinked to the changing global paradigms ofdemocracy. The global vocabulary of goodgovernance has not yet come to dominateour thinking on politics the way it has inAfrica and other parts of the Third Worldand the way its economic counterpartdominates our thinking on the economy. Yetthe intellectual climate of globalisation has

played a deep role in eroding our collectivesense of alternative possibilities in the realmof politics too. Coupled with the domesticanxieties of a highly articulate ‘middle class’(a euphemism for the urban, upper caste,consuming class in India) in a post-Mandalphase of democratic politics, best capturedin the rhetoric of Seshan or the prescriptionsof the Law Commission, this new discourseon political reform has quietly taken overthe popular imagination. The formation andthe preliminary output of the NationalCommission to Review the Working of theConstitution falls squarely within thisimagination.Let us look at some attributes of thisconservative perspective that dominatesthinking on political reforms. First, it shareswith its predecessors the preoccupation withinstitutions of high politics: nationallegislature, executive, and possiblyjudiciary. There may be an occasionalreference to panchayati raj, but the principlefocus of the intellectual and practical energyis on changing the design of centralgovernment. Second, there is a universalsearch for a good political or electoralsystem with a view to importing the bestpolitical practices to India. Although there isa ritual reference to contemporarymalpractices in Indian democracy, theproposals are not anchored in any analysisof here and now. No wonder, the result is akind of Internet shopping in a globalconstitutional superstore (American twopartysystem, German constructive vote ofconfidence, French mix of the presidentialand parliamentary systems, and so on).Third, there is a simplistic belief in themagic of design. All that is required to solvea problem is to change the law. Once you

have the right design, the desired set ofconsequences will follow as a matter ofcourse. What it does not consider is thephenomenon of unintended consequences,and that these are not random or accidental.The idea that all constitutional and legaldesigns have political consequences that canlargely be anticipated is alien to this mode ofthinking.This is related to a fourth attribute. Theconservative perspective has a very narrowunderstanding of design itself. Aninstitutional design is understood as a legalconstitutionaldesign alone. Politics isexternal to this design of democracy, if notseen as an outright nuisance. Much of thecontemporary discussion on politicalreforms proceeds as if democracy canflourish without politics. No wonder manyof these designs reflect a deep fear ofpolitics and are an attempt to wish it away.Finally, the dominant perspective is notanchored sociologically; it does notsufficiently differentiate between the varioussections of society who stand to benefit orlose from specific acts of political orelectoral reforms. No wonder anundifferentiated discussion about the‘citizens’ does not turn out to be a viewfrom nowhere. Much of the ethical anxietyunderlying the dominant perspective onelectoral reforms reflects the concerns of theso-called middle class.The consequences of this approach are bynow familiar. The political doctor identifiesthe symptoms of the disease that afflicts ourbody politic: the role of money and musclepower, political opportunism, decline inmoral fibre of the leadership, and so on. Thetone reflects a deep hatred, not just ofpoliticians and political parties but of

politics itself. A new item now enters thelist: political instability, understood in termsof the stability of governments. Thediagnosis for all these ills is simple: anabsence of effective legal controls onpoliticians and political parties. As forinstability, proliferation of political parties isseen as the root cause of the malaise.The prescription naturally follows from thisdiagnosis: a strict regime of legal controlson the entry of criminals and the role ofmoney in electoral politics, plus a series ofmeasures to ensure that the political arena isde-crowded and govern mental stabilityensured (increase in security deposit,additional conditionalities for contestingelections, banning independents, denyingseats to small parties, fixed term for thelegislatures, and so on).Thus the mainstream perspective nowthreatens to turn into a conservative platformfor refashioning the political structures tosuit the interest of a small, hithertoentrenched but now threatened class. Thisagenda amounts to nothing short of undoingthe results of the democratic upsurge of thelast decade. It is all about sanitizingdemocracy for decent citizens ‘like us’,saving democracy from the people. In thisversion political reform is a corollary of andan effective vehicle for the ‘economicreforms’ package of liberalisation,privatisation and globalisation, aprerequisite for rolling back the state.Faced with this onslaught, the radicals haveretreated into a defensive battle forpreserving the basics of a liberal democraticframework. Those who spent a lifetime inhighlighting the deficiencies of the IndianConstitution are now busy defending its

progressive features and investing it with anewly discovered sanctity. At this rate it isnot inconceivable that the radicals may bereduced to defending the bare minimums ofuniversal adult franchise. The cognitiveambition of restructuring the polity in linewith some dreams about a future society andeconomy has been surrendered, notdissimilar to what has happened in theeconomic arena. However, in the politicalarena the radicals cannot even demand whatUnger calls a ‘ten per cent discount’. Theirfragile intellectual heritage on this subjectleads them in to unthinking collaborationwith their adversaries.It is not uncommon to see well meaningdemocrats share the middle class angst aboutpolitics and parrot an anti-politicalvocabulary. Their institutional agenda is nottoo dissimilar from the conservative agendain its focus on a regime of legal controls.With the sole exception of a consistent (and,typically, institutionally ill-designed)advocacy of women’s reservations, theradical democrats have contributed little tothe agenda of political reforms in recenttimes, not to speak of a comprehensiveproposal on institutional redesigning.There is hardly a serious challenge to theemerging conservative agenda on politicalreforms. In the resultant imaginative deficit,radical gestures of political reform take astrange turn. There is a misplaced moraloutburst when salaries and perks forMembers of Parliament are raised to a levellower than those of senior bureaucrats (seeYadav 2001). There is an innocent beliefthat providing for a ‘negative vote’ on theballot or arming voters with a ‘right torecall’ will solve the ills of our democracy.A sense of deep pessimism that informs theradicals today is self-evident. What is notclear to them is that their lack of imaginationis partly responsible for the narrow horizonof political possibilities open to them.

A brief comment on the contribution of theacademic discipline of political science tothinking about political reforms is in order atthis point. If it has contributed little to aradical agenda for political reform, it is notbecause the discipline lacked radicalorientation, at least in the obvious sense ofpolitical affiliation. The top intellectual andinstitutional spaces in this discipline weredominated by academics with progressive, ifnot left, affiliations in the last couple ofdecades. The problem was that they simplydid not find the challenge of institutionalredesign worthy of their intellectualattention.The dominance of political theory resultedin trivializing any academic work that dealtwith real life institutions and policies. Thiscame from a mix of marxist superstition thatrevolution will look after everything and thebrahminic arrogance in dealing with thenitty-gritty of institutional functioning.Those who did not share the radicalorientation and its resultant indifference tothe question of political reforms, shared insome form or the other the fetishism ofwestern institutions. The state of thediscipline of public administration is a livingtestimony to this intellectual catastrophe.All in all, the professional practitioners ofpolitical science either reproduced theprejudices of the politics they espoused or,worse, the social class they come from. Farfrom providing an intellectual design forpolitical practitioners, the discipline failed toprovide even the empirical information onwhich such designing and innovation maytake place. The closest the discipline cameto contributing to national debates onpolitical reforms was recently when somepolitical scientists allegedly wrote one of the

most embarrassing consultation papers ofthe NCRWC. None of the recent initiativeson political reforms – MKSS’ campaign onthe right to information, Lok Satta’s variousinitiatives on electoral rolls and financereforms and Nagarpalika Network’s effortsat rejuvenating local democracy – coulddraw upon any idea, information or insightfrom the discipline.Let me not dwell any more on how not tothink about political reforms. It is time toexplicate the hints embedded in the abovecritique and offer constructive suggestionson approaching this subject. If the critiqueoffered above has any merit, what we needis nothing less than a paradigm shift from astate-of-the-art view of political technologyto the ‘appropriate technology’ view ofthings, from thinking of democracy ashardware to recognition that it is a softwarethat depends on protocols of reception.We begin to clear the conceptual ground forthinking about political reforms by gettingrid of some of the reigning superstitions ofour times: the idea that there is a universallyvalid institutional design of liberaldemocracy; the suggestion that a set of bestpolitical practices can and should bereplicated all over the world; the theory thatthe idea of democracy can be reduced to astandard ‘checklist’.Once it is recognised that there is nouniversally applicable and valid package ofpolitical reforms or a model of democracy, itfollows that a reasonable starting point forthinking about political reforms is here and

now, India of year 2001 A.D. We can thustake the next step of working towards anagenda that is anchored in time and space, isconsequence sensitive, takes the logic ofpolitics as integral to thinking aboutinstitutional design and is conscious of thedifferential consequences for different socialgroups. Working out such an agenda meansasking some fundamental questions: Why dowe need political reforms? Why at thisstage? What should we prioritise? And, whois this ‘we’, the bearer of this responsibility?This paradigm shift has another fundamentalimplication that must be noted. If here andnow is the only starting point available to us,there is and will never be a clean politicalslate to write our dreams on. The existinggamut of political institutions and practicesis the building bloc available to institutionalinnovators. What exists can be transformed– and the whole point of institutionalinnovation is to transform these in the rightdirection – but it has to be replaced orrepaired brick by brick. It follows that theentire range of modern political institutionsformally inaugurated by the IndianConstitution and the patterns of competitivepolitics cannot simply be wished away.Once introduced, the compulsions oforganising political life on the scale of anation state cannot be rolled back at will.It is a terrible thought for those who areconscious of the human costs of politicalmodernity. But it may be tempered by therecent recognition that modernity has hadmultiple trajectories in history and can bemade to have many more in the future. Thisabstract idea has a concrete corollary forthose who take JP’s critique ofparliamentary democracy in India seriously.The point of his critique and the visionunderlying it can still be rescued if we seethe challenge of political reforms as not thatof going back to any traditional model but as

one of forging a different kind of modernitysuited to our requirements and values.The agenda of political reform in India hasto be different from the challenge in theadvanced industrial democracies, for ourproblem is not demobilisation and slowingdown of democracy (contra Unger’sdiagnosis of western democracies). At thesame time, unlike other new democracies ofthe Third World, India does not face thechallenge of democratic transition orconsolidation (see Linz and Stepan). Theproblems in Indian democracy are not theresult of a failure of the modern idea ofdemocracy to take roots in an alien setting.Rather we are faced with problems arisingout of an apparent success of the democraticexperiment.The people accepted the democraticinvitation and over the years popularpolitical participation has only gone up. Thelast decade has seen something of ademocratic upsurge. Popular participation isnot devoid of a sense of legitimacy andefficacy of the democratic system. Theelections are free and fair in the minimalsense that the rulers are not assured of areturn to power; they are at least more freeand fair than in most Third Worlddemocracies. Yet the existence of thisdemocracy does not deliver whatdemocracies are supposed to: peoples’control over how collective decisionsaffecting their lives are arrived at.The real failure of the current phase ofIndian democracy is not the failure to hold

free and fair elections, nor the inability ofthe people to affect change in governmentsthrough the exercise of their free vote, butthe growing distortion in the mechanism ofpolitical representation, the growingdistance between the electors and theelected, the inability of the mechanism ofcompetitive politics to serve as a means ofexercising effective policy options. Clearly,the institutional frame of democracy hasfailed to translate popular participation andenthusiasm into a set of desirableconsequences.This is not merely a universal deficit in thepromise of democracy. We are looking at arange of failures that are rooted morespecifically in our experience. Some of themwere written into the logic of democracy in asociety like India. The fundamentalcontradiction pointed out by Ambedkar, thatof instituting equal citizenship in a highlyunequal society, lies at the root of many ofthe failures. Social inequality was furtheraccentuated by unequal access to the meansof forming and disseminating publicopinion. Another contradiction was builtinto the act of importing politicalinstitutions, especially those that requiredautonomy, in a cultural setting whereattitudinal prerequisites were missing. Therewas the structural problem of constituting apolity to coincide with the boundaries of acivilisation when much of the meaningfulpolitical action and mobilisation could takeplace in micro-settings.Some other failures of the democraticexperiments are not structural, but specificto the history of democracy over the last 50years. The weak policy orientation of dalitbahujanpolitics, a lack of emphasis oninstitution building, the decision not tochange the character of the bureaucracy andthe retreat of the state in the face of theforces of globalisation were in no waynecessary to the design of Indian

democracy. But these have contributedsubstantially to the democratic deficit facingus today.The principal task of political reform is toaddress the democratic deficit and some ofits root causes. Specifically, the challenge isto strengthen devices that facilitate popularmobilisation and its effective expression inthe formation of political agendas,formulation of governmental policies andtheir effective execution. In the context ofthe retreat of the state, there is a need tobring back the primacy of politics andrestore its capacity to act as the principalvehicle of social change. The litmus test forany proposal of ‘radical’ political reforms isits ability to deepen the ongoing process ofdemocratization for the social groups andcommunities that have historically beendenied access to political power.If this understanding of the deficits ofIndian democracy and the need for politicalreforms is not entirely off the mark, someconclusions about the arena and theinstruments of political reform follow. First,it needs to be recognised that politicalreform constitutes a critical part of theagenda of social transformation in today’sIndia. Radicals of all hues have by nowaccepted that democratic struggle is the onlypath to social transformation. But they havenot fully understood its implication: itrequires bold institutional imagination witheyes and wings to be able to use the existingdemocratic apparatus for radical ends.The second set of conclusions relates to thearena of reforms. They should not beconfined to or focused on electoral reforms,as has often been the case. The scope needsto be expanded to include the entire range of

political reforms in the comprehensive senseof the term. Similarly, the focus should shiftaway from the high arena of national politicstowards the intermediary and lower levelswhere democratic governance meets, orrather fails to meet, the people. The ‘lower’levels in the political and administrativehierarchy must not occupy a low position inthe agenda for political reform.Finally, the question of instruments. There isa case for thinking beyond law as theprivileged agent of political reform. While asubstantial part of institutional innovationmust be carried out through or at leastreflected in legal changes, there is a need toshift the emphasis of analytical energy tothinking about other instruments (publicopinion, media, social movements) that mustaccompany or supplement legalconstitutionalchanges so as to yield thedesired institutional practices. This iscrucial, for there are unrealised possibilitiesof existing institutions. As the example ofthe Election Commission of India itselfshows, institutional practices can improvesubstantially even within the given legalinstitutionalframework.And now, finally, to the agenda itself, to aquick overview of the items that should finda place in the radical agenda for politicalreforms in contemporary India. Let us firstrevisit the ‘old arena’, the high ground ofnational politics that has in the past attractedmost political reformers and see if somefamiliar items appear in a different lighttoday. We can then try to outline the ‘newarena’ of political reforms. I simply presentthe bare conclusions rather than offerdetailed reasoning for each of these, as othercontributors in this issue look at many of

these areas more closely (see Yadav 1996and 2000 for more details).Redesigning the electoral system hasfigured prominently in the agenda forpolitical reforms even before the TarkundeCommittee. The first generation ofreformers was quite persuaded by the meritsof proportional representation as against theexisting first-past-the-post system. I thinkthere is a need to rethink if PR needs tofigure on the radical agenda and if the issueof electoral system deserves to have thesalience in the agenda of political reformsthat it has enjoyed in the past. The changingpattern of politics, the rise of region-basedparties and decline of national parties hasautomatically corrected the vote-seatimbalance at the national level and renderedharmless some of the classic arguments infavour of the PR system.Besides, there is an insufficient recognitionin radical circles of the virtues of theexisting system, especially its impact on thepolitics of social cleavages. By forcing thepolitical actors to form social coalitions atthe constituency level, the existing systempromotes social cohesion, while a PRsystem can easily turn into a system ofseparate electorates. It seems much of theenthusiasm for a PR system emanates fromlack of careful analysis of the politicalconsequences of this system (see Sridharan2001, for an exception) and an insufficientawareness of its disastrous consequences incountries like Sri Lanka. It only illustrateshow an agenda of political reforms can getdistorted by attractive global imports.If there is any need to tinker with theelectoral system, it is with a view to addresstwo specific problems: under-representation

of women and Muslims. In both cases theunder-representation is gross and structural,and therefore unlikely to be overcome in thenormal course of things. Both these are fitcases for redesigning institutions. But itneeds to be ensured that the proposedchange would achieve the objective and itsside effects will not outweigh the benefits.The Women’s Reservation Bill thatproposes to reserve one-third seats in thelegislatures does not meet these elementarycriteria. It is not clear if the reservation ofgeographical constituencies is the best routein this case, especially given all theattendant effects of the rotation system. TheWRB illustrates the lack of attention to thechallenge of institutional design in radicalcircles (See, for example, otherwise veryinsightful and valuable articles by NiveditaMenon and Mary John). It seems to me that,on balance, the alternative of mandatoryquota of tickets for women by everyrecognised party better meets the objectiveof the WRB (for details, see Madhu Kishwaret al.).The first difficulty with addressing theproblem of under-representation of Muslimsis the inability and unwillingness of theradicals to discuss it openly. Once weovercome that, we come across a realdilemma. It is possible to design a system,either through careful delimitation thatproduces Muslim plurality constituencies orthrough a ‘top up’ arrangement of a semiproportionatesystem, to ensure that Muslimrepresentation in the legislature goes upsubstantially. But in both these cases, theresult will have been achieved at the cost ofreducing the clout of the Muslim electoratein the remaining constituencies. And someof these measures may not have healthyeffects for the entire polity. Working a way

out of this dilemma is one of the mostpressing challenges of institutionalinnovation in India (see Iqbal Ansari in thisissue).Like with the electoral system, changingthe basic design of the executive-legislaturerelationship has attracted reformers rightfrom the beginning. A desire to flirt withsome form or the other of US-stylepresidentialism is not new. But what wasearlier an innocent if sad desire to copyeverything American has taken a specificpolitical hue in recent years. Now it is a notso-innocentdesign to tilt the political scalesin favour of a national political party like theBJP. The arguments for the presidentialsystem show little understanding of whatthis system was originally designed toproduce. It also reveals a completeignorance of the disastrous record of thepresidential system all over the world,especially in Latin America (see Linz andValenzuela).The same is true about a fixed tenure for thelegislature that goes against the basic spiritand functional requirements of theparliamentary system. The system of aconstructive vote of confidence would solvea minor problem, only to create a muchbigger constitutional deadlock (see JamesManor). As of now there seems to be littlereason to doubt or revise the wisdom of ourconstitution-makers on the choice of aparliamentary form of government. In fact, aresolute opposition to any proposal forchange should be on the agenda for politicalreforms.A small suggestion worth considering aboutexecutive powers is that the appointmentand accountability of high constitutional

offices should be ensured through aconstitutional appointment committeecomprising the leader of the opposition, thespeaker, the chief justice of the SupremeCourt, besides the prime minister. Givingmore powers to the lokpal and thelokayuktas is a suggestion in the samedirection.Another set of proposals have traditionallyfocused on the composition of thelegislatures, either on the question ofallocation of seats in the legislatures orpreventing party switch after elections. Onthe former, the 91st ConstitutionalAmendment Bill has already been passed byParliament without sufficient national debateand awareness of its implications. AlistairMcMillan is quite justified in arguing thatthe decision to freeze inter-state allocation inthe name of population control violates thebasic one-person one-vote principle of ourConstitution. His suggestion that federalpolitical balancing should be attempted byrestructuring the Rajya Sabha to give greaterrepresentation to smaller states needs to betaken seriously.The anti-defection law represents one of thefew cases of successful institutionalinnovation in post independence India.While it would be sad to give up its gains, itwould be fatal to try and ‘tighten’ it up bybanning defections altogether. Thedisastrous implications of such a provisionfor inner-party democracy must be weighedagainst any presumed gains. The antidefectionact needs fine tuning by makingthe Election Commission rather than thespeaker the adjudicator of any dispute (seePeter Ronald deSouza in this issue). Thepolitical horse-trading and money gamesplayed before the Rajya Sabha elections

could be discouraged by allowing politicalparties to inspect the record of how theirlegislators voted.Another favourite subject of old stylepolitical reforms was to legislate on thenature of the party system, mainly todetermine the number of players and tobring it close to the ‘ideal’ of a two partysystem. It was often driven by the idea that aparty system can be picked from thesupermarket of political designs.Historically, party systems evolve partly inresponse to the nature of electoral systemand partly in response to the nature ofsociety and political traditions. We can onlytinker with it by encouraging ordiscouraging a certain growth, but anyattempt to genetically modify the entiresystem is likely to be disastrous, as inNigeria. It is not clear why the evolution ofthe party system in the last decade or soneeds to be viewed as pathological. Whatlooks like the fragmentation of the partysystem has in fact brought parties closer tothe ground and facilitated the practice ofaccountability (see Yadav 1999). Since noneof the region based parties have a separatistagenda, it is not clear why this developmentposes a threat to the nation.The focus of attention on the party systemshould shift from the number of parties towhat they do. There is a case for two kindsof reforms here:* There is a need for minimalist legislationto regulate the internal functioning ofpolitical parties. The legislation couldrequire political parties to follow their ownconstitution, to allow for externaladjudication in the last instance, maintain anopen register of membership and provide for

egular and democratic election to thehighest decision making body. At the sametime the temptation to legislate on everyaspect of the functioning of political partiesmust be resisted (see Pratap Mehta).* Contrary to dominant opinion, there is infact a special need to protect small politicalformations, along the lines of saving smallscaleindustry from big monopoly houses inthe economic realm. The experience of thelast few decades shows that the compulsionsof large scale and huge resources built intoour existing system tends to kill smallerpolitical formations, forcing them to becomepart of one of the big parties. Not onlyshould any attempt to further discouragesmaller parties (as suggested by the LawCommission) be resisted, institutionalinnovations should be made to enable thesmaller formations overcome unfaircompetition of scale and resources. Thiscould be done by not allowing recognisedparties to participate in the panchayatelections or by making available monetaryand other resources on a non-discriminatorybasis.Some old and long-standing suggestions forcontrolling electoral malpractices need to benoted and endorsed here, whileremembering that in the last instance it is thepopular verdict that controls suchmalpractices:* Electoral rolls should be put under thecharge of local post offices, as suggested byLok Satta’s campaign on electoral rollsreforms (see Jayaprakash Narayan in thisissue).* The proportion of tendered votes shouldbe linked to the requirement for repolling inthe booth.

* Candidates should be made to declare thecases pending against him or her involvingcharges of criminal conduct or corruption atthe time of filing nominations.* Similarly, candidates should declareproperty and income for the last three yearsat the time of filing nominations. Falsedeclaration on both these should be a groundfor disqualification.* The returns of expenses filed by thecandidates and the tax returns filed bypolitical parties should be made public.* The ceiling on election expenditure shouldbe regularly increased and fixed only at apoint where one candidates’ expense affectsall the others.* Political advertising on television shouldbe banned before it can take off and developvested interests.* The new delimitation exercise should bemade more professional and transparentalong the lines of the recommendations ofan experts workshop held this year.Valuable as these reforms in the old arenaare, I have suggested that a radical agendafor political reforms must not foregroundthese. The attention should now shift to thenew arena of reforms that has opened up,thanks to the issues highlighted by socialand non-party political movements in thelast decade or so. Some of these go beyondthe traditional boundaries of political reformand spill over to ‘administrative’, ‘judicial’and ‘media’ reforms. But then the point ofthe new arena is to question the rationale ofthe earlier boundaries. The new arenareforms can be divided into four parts: (i)measures to safeguard the primacy of

democratic governance; (ii) measures for decenteringthe polity and reducing thecompulsions of scale; (iii) measures toensure a less unequal access to resources inpolitics; and (iv) measures to encouragedemocratisation of political information andopinions.Not all of these suggestions are new. TheAgenda for India, for instance, did anticipatesome of these suggestions, especially thesecond set, way back in 1980. But as apackage this articulates a new thinkingimplicit in some of the recent attempts atpolitical reforms.Let us consider these four areas one by one.The first set of measures try to respond tothe anxiety about the erosion ofdemocratically elected authorities in the lastdecade either to the bureaucratic and thetechnocratic establishment or to theinternational economic institutions. Theseerosions threaten to undo many of the gainsof the democratic upsurge in the last decade.Some possible suggestions:* It should be mandatory for the governmentto get any international economic agreementratified by the Parliament. This would covernot only the treaties under the WTO but alsothe MOUs signed with bodies like IMF.* Similar treaties that affect the subjects inthe state list must be ratified by a majority ofstate legislatures.* Every non-elective regulatory authorityshould be subjected to public accountability.* The recent practice of Group of Ministersto short circuit decision-making in theministries should be discouraged.

The need for political decentralisation isclearly not a new subject. It has beencommented upon and spelt out at length andin the last decade our polity has moved inthat direction thanks to the 73rd and the 74thamendments and the change in our partysystem. What is required is to press for theconsolidation of these gains and to see theseas measures of political reform:* Greater financial powers for the stategovernments as suggested by the SarkariaCommission.* Strengthening the new panchayati rajframework by making it mandatory todevolve greater powers and financialresources to the panchayats and nagarpalikasand ensuring the role of gram sabhas.* Constitution of another StateReorganisation Commission to go into thevarious demands for small states.* Include within the purview of such acommission the question of greater politicalautonomy to backward regions within largestates by expanding the scope of theinstitution of Autonomous Councils beyondScheduled Tribe areas.The issue of unequal access to resources inpolitics has conventionally been taken up inthe old arena as the measure for reducing therole of ‘money power’ in politics with itstypical emphasis on a regime of controls toensure a ceiling on political expenses. Theemphasis should now shift from the issue ofceiling to that of securing a floor, from aregime of controls to a package of enablingmeasures to ensure adequate and equalsupply of resources. Contrary to popularimpression based on highly publicised cases

of national and state level political elites,there is a serious dearth of legitimateresources in politics, made worse by grosslyunequal distribution of what is available.The problem is not that spending moremoney ensures victory in elections, but thatlack of money denies an entry into thepolitical arena. This area acquires newsalience in the context of the democraticupsurge from below and the rolling back ofthe welfare state. Some measures to rectifythis inequality are:* State funding by way of reimbursement ofelection expenses for each candidate or partyat the rate of, say, Rs 10 for each votesecured.* Funds to be given on a non discriminatorybasis to all the candidates/ parties, and notonly to recognised political parties assuggested by the Indrajit Gupta Committee.* Funding to be available in cash rather thankind (again, contra the Gupta Committee) sothat it could be used for political activitiesin-between elections.* Tax exemption up to a certain limit toindividuals and companies for contributionsto political parties.* Civil society initiatives to set up publicfunds for political workers.Finally, the arena of democratisinginformation promises to be one of the mostcritical arenas for political reforms in theyears to come, an arena where traditionalstate legislation is a weak instrument ofreforms. Some proposals are:* Struggle for ‘right to information’ not onlyin the sense of demand for central and state

legislation, but in the wider sense ofmovement for direct and democraticaccountability of state functionaries to thepeople by organisations like the MKSS.* Measures like the Kerala initiative fordirect participation of the people in thepolicy formulation and developmentalplanning.* Restoring the spirit of the independentpublic broadcaster behind the Prasar Bharatilegislation and removing all the recentdistortions.* Measures to democratise the ownership ofprivate media and curb monopolisticpractices, and to ensure easy access to cheapmedia to small groups and movements.* Restrictions and regulations on theoperation of foreign media, whether in printor otherwise.* Measures to change the social profile ofthe media practitioners and to ensure theentry of communities that were deniedaccess to higher learning.* Evolving a self-regulatory code foropinion polls, prescribing greatermethodological transparency and rigour, sothat the views of a small section cannot beimposed in the name of public opinion.* Greater public investment in democraticknowledge enterprise, so that informationabout trends and patterns in democraticpolitics is regularly gathered and madeavailable publically.The agenda outlined above is only a roughsketch that hints at the areas rather thanpresent a plan of action. By its very nature,it suffers from an inattention to details thatare critical to the success of an enterpriselike this. And, above all, it does not evenbegin to address the issues of agency andstrategy: who would carry out this agenda?

Under what conditions does it have a chanceof being accepted? It does not offer anythoughts about a minimalist coalition that isnecessary to carry out a radical agenda ofpolitical reforms. In this context it leavesunattended the vexed relationship ofattempts to bring about political reformswith substantive radical or alternativepolitics. The question is: must a radicalagenda for political reform wait for thetriumph of radical politics? On the otherhand, can radical politics succeed withoutany political reforms that precede it?References:An Agenda for India, Seminar (245), January 1980.Alistair McMillan, ‘Delimitation, Democracy andEnd of Constitutional Freeze’, Economic andPolitical Weekly 35(15), 8 April 2000.Alistair McMillan, ‘Constituting 91st AmendmentBill: A Constitutional Fraud?’ Economic andPolitical Weekly 36(14&15) 14 April 2001.Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (eds.), TheFailure of Presidential Democracy: ComparativePerspectives, vol. I. Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1994.E. Sridharan (forthcoming). ‘Does India Need toSwitch to Proportional Representation’, in PaulFlathur (ed.), Indian Politics: How to RefreshDemocracy. London: Macmillan.Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problem ofDemocratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.L.P. Singh, Electoral Reform: Problems andSuggested Solutions. New Delhi: Uppal, 1986.Mary E. John, ‘Alternate Modernities? Reservationsand Women’s Movement in 20th Century India’,Economic and Political Weekly 35(43 & 44), 28October 2000, pp. WS-22.Madhu Kishwar, Jayaprakash Narayan, D.L. Shethand Yogendra Yadav, ‘Call for Support: AnAlternative Bill for Women’s Reservation’. Forum

for Democratic Reforms, Rammanohar Lohia SamataVidyala Nyas, 2000.‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1), Winter,2000.National Commission to Review the Working of theConstitution, ‘Review of the Working of PoliticalParties Especially in Relation to Elections andReform Options: A Consultation Paper’. New Delhi,2001.National Commission to Review the Working of theConstitution, ‘Review of Election Law, Process andReform Options: A Consultation Paper’. New Delhi,2001.Nivedita Menon, ‘Elusive "Women": Feminism andWomen’s Reservation Bill’, Economic and PoliticalWeekly 35(43 & 44), 28 October 2000, pp. WS-35.Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘Reform Political Parties First’,Seminar (497), January 2001.Satish Sabarwal, India: The Roots of Crisis. NewDelhi: Oxford University Press, 1986.S.L. Shakdher, Electoral Reforms for India. Delhi:The Voters’ Council and Citizens for Democracy,1980.S.L. Shakdher, ‘Electoral Reforms’, Journal ofConstitutional and Parliamentary Studies 18(1-2),January-June 1984.Report of the Committee on Electoral Reforms,Tarkunde Committee, Delhi: Citizens for Democracy,1975.Yogendra Yadav, ‘Electoral Reforms: BeyondMiddle Class Fantasies’, Seminar (440), April 1996.Yogendra Yadav, ‘Politics’, in Marshall Bouton andPhilip Oldenburg (eds.), India Briefing: ATransformative Fifty Years. New York: M.E. Sharpe,1999.Yogendra Yadav ‘Understanding the SecondDemocratic Upsurge: Trends of BahujanParticipation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s’, inFrancine R. Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargavaand Balveer Arora (eds.), Transforming India: Socialand Political Dynamics of Democracy. Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000.Yogendra Yadav, ‘Whose Democracy? WhichReforms? A Plea for a Democratic Agenda forElectoral Reforms’, in Subhash C. Kashyap et al.

(eds), Reviewing the Constitution? Delhi: Shipra,2000.Yogendra Yadav, ‘Let’s Find an Alternative’, IndianExpress, 19 June 2001.Yogendra Yadav, ‘Saansadon ke Vetan Bhatte’(Hindi), Hindustan, 13 September 2001.