Readers Write In #694: One Nation One Election- a leftist perspective/rant

By G Waugh

It sometimes pains me to think that most people, a majority of us, laymen and the educated alike, while assuming that we are socially conscious citizens, often care very less about what exactly needs to be cared the most – the economy. When I say economy, I hate to use terms that are high-sounding and simultaneously repulsive like say, the tax-to-GDP ratio, the net household savings, current account deficit and the like. 

When the current ruling party in India wants people to think about the new idea ‘One Nation, One Election’, it wants everyone to analyze and calculate how much money could the government save if it is allowed to hold elections for both the Parliament and the state assemblies at the same time. How efficiently the resources of the government- both financial and human- could be used by laying two Voting Machines one beside the other for the voter, the first one for the Lok Sabha and the other for the State Assembly at the same time. At the first glance, it is a salivating prospect for anyone who cares a lot about millions and millions of taxpayer money that goes into the business of holding elections, in fact year on year when we have elections in one state or another due to differing expiry dates for every elected state assembly in India.

But when one is in the process of examining thoroughly this ‘economizing’ facet of the ‘One Nation, One Election’ idea, there is one another that misses one’s eye almost completely. It is so huge and terribly important that missing that aspect while focussing upon the other, is tantamount to, say, almost losing one’s vision in the process. While I admit that the elections do serve the purpose of giving voice to the millions and millions of India’s often voiceless masses, it is often forgotten that the way elections happen here- a Lok Sabha election this year, a couple of elections for the State Assemblies the next year and so on till the next Lok Sabha election- is an integral part of how our very political economy is designed and made to work.

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India, as we know right from its Independence, was designed to be a capitalist state, no matter how thick and prominent its ‘socialist’ veneer was. The basic idea of how the economy was supposed to work was the much-vaunted ‘trickle-down’ concept – the private capitalists were supposed to create and accumulate money for the country as a whole, while the small change that leaked through their pockets would find its beneficiaries among the teeming and the clamoring millions beneath. The government’s place in the scheme of things was just to make sure the holes in the pockets of the private capitalists were at least larger than the size of the coins that were expected to fall through them.

In the first forty-five years since Independence, the government put so many spokes in the wheels of the private capitalists in the form of regulations, licenses and trading protocols, as a result of which it is often complained that they couldn’t make as much money as they would have liked to. The beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century however, marked a watershed. The government somehow had been forced to realize its mistake and a good number of those restrictions were lifted directly to the benefit of the so-called India’s wealth- creators. 

In the next decade or so, India’s economic pie- the amount of money India the nation was creating with the ‘benediction’ and ‘foresight’ of India’s private capitalists – grew by leaps and bounds. Until 1991, the pie as a whole was so small that it barely fed the needs of the topmost layer while the government had to beg and coax the capitalists to throw away at least the soggy bits of the pie’s crust for the starving millions beneath.

But by the beginning of the 2000s, India’s wealth-creators were able to forge a boom, something so big and unprecedented that the rest of the world was forced to stop and take notice. The pie as a result was so huge now that the government could see that the bakers were not only having it for themselves but also stashing the remnants for tomorrow as well. Hence the government’s claim of the pie too grew alongside and its long ‘tentacles’ did a fairly good job of expropriating the surplus from the capitalists and redistributing them among India’s hapless masses. 

India, as a result was able to lift millions of its citizens out of poverty and the so-called Welfare State or the ‘socialist’ veneer that the State was so proud about continued to glitter in all its glory.

When you observe this story, you may find that it has only three main characters playing a major role- first the ‘wealth-creators’ or the capitalists, second the masses and third the so-called ‘intermediary’, the government. In the pre-reform period, the first forty-five years since India’s independence, the government by virtue of its relative financial largeness and political legitimacy remained the most powerful character. The wealth-creators were smaller due to their willingness to subordinate themselves to the government and the restrictions that kept them in check.

After 1991, the power equations changed and the wealth-creators, though few in number, started burgeoning in terms of wherewithal and influence, suddenly finding themselves with so much resources and freedom at their disposal. The government on the other hand, naturally kept paling in comparison. In this changed scenario, the re-invented capitalist class had so much power now that it could intervene directly even in the day-to-day functioning of the government, leave alone its policy-making and long-term vision. With so much influence that afforded the capitalist class recklessness along with impunity, it would have been a fool not to use it for its own ulterior purposes at the expense of others. This however, it naturally did. It tried to bend the government to their will- trying to force it to pass legislation that allowed unchecked access to India’s vast natural resources such as land, bauxite, forests, natural gas,etc. The capitalist class did its best to weaken laws pertaining to the protection of industrial workers and their rights to a minimum wage, collective bargaining and unionization. It tried to arm-twist the government into removing caps and subsidies on farming inputs and weakening guarantees on minimum prices for the harvested crop to ensure free access for itself into India’s vast agricultural sector. 

But over the past thirty years, the government for the most part, though reluctantly, has tried to push back against the pressures of the wealth-creators with varying degrees of success. But it must be remembered that right from our Independence, the government’s willingness to protect the poorest of its poorest citizen by playing at least a miniscule role in the redistribution of India’s created wealth did not stem from a natural, inherent, all-embracing, ‘motherly’ impulse. The government, in other words, the ruling or the political classes banked heavily on the opinion of the voters, the majority of whom were daily wage laborers, small and marginal farmers, farm and industrial workers, proprietors of micro and small businesses, etc. for their own political legitimacy. In other words, the political class that controlled the levers of the machinery of the government was forced to act in the interests of India’s poorest against the overwhelming machinations of the private capitalists only to ensure and protect its own survival. As it becomes clear, the only bulwark with which India’s working class, the proletariat, has been able to ward itself off from the dangers of the marauding Indian big business interests has been nothing but the only remaining vestige of India’s democracy- the ballot.

It was nothing but the fear of elections and elections alone that held the government from amending the Land Acquisition Bill of 2013 multiple times, a move that would have given India’s vast land resources on a platter to the rapacious big business elite at the expense of their rightful owners- the communities and the flora-fauna that held them.

It was the same fear that held the government from implementing the Farm Laws that threatened to remove minimum support guarantees on crop prices in order to facilitate the entry of India’s biggest private corporations into our vast agricultural market. 

It was the same story when it came to the implementation of GST slabs for various commodities as the government kept revisiting them time and again so as not to alienate the voters who belonged to the small and medium business sector.

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There can be no prizes for guessing whose brain-child the whole idea of ‘One Nation, One Election’ could have been. The ballot shall be the last frontier that India’s big business interests would like to get past in their mission to take over the Indian economy as a whole. I know a lot of activists all over the world who are currently splitting hairs on how to deepen democracy further, how to regulate or minimize corporate funding of elections, how to sensitize more people on the power of the ballot, etc. A good number of European governments have the habit of holding referendums on major policy issues to get a finger on the pulse of their citizens before arriving at a major decision. But it is only the Indian State on the other hand, which is on the cusp of going in reverse- doing its best towards minimizing democracy, to snatch away whatever little that remains in the hands of its already powerless citizens with a diabolic view to completely cut them away from its already muddled decision-making processes.