Editorials

India Today, May 10, 1999
May 10, 1999

Out With the Pesky

Why too many parties are not necessarily healthy for democracy

Edits As India readies for its third general election in three years, rhetoric is flying thick and fast. The past week has seen a plethora of suggestions on how to reform the electoral process, safeguard governance from a fractured mandate and, in sum, enhance the clarity of the political system. Talk of a national government or of a "pre-election common minimum programme" to which all parties adhere is suitably virtuous but, quite frankly, not feasible. Without going into the melodrama of calling for a "second republic" and a presidential system, it would do to consider tinkering with the present mechanism. R. Venkataraman, the former President, has made a cogent case for imposing checks on the proliferation of small, even one-person parties. Venkataraman's methods, however, seem a trifle too drastic. He has suggested all parties that get less than 10 per cent of the vote in the coming polls be derecognised by the Election Commission (EC). A graded movement would do better.

It would be appropriate to draw an analogy with the raising of the security deposit for parliamentary elections in 1996. This was done to curb non-serious candidates. As the experience of recent coalition governments has shown, the post-election spoilsports are tiny parties and maverick individual MPs. They are the practitioners of nuisance value, those whose importance is directly proportional to the mess they create. A start can be made by derecognising parties that do not get a specified percentage -- the onus of naming the figure must lie with the EC -- of the popular vote. Progressively, over successive elections, the polity can move towards Venkataraman's 10 per cent mark or even further. If successful, this method could be a guarantor of stability. Regional groups will be forced to either merge or gravitate towards the national party they have an affinity for. The business of switching alliance partners at the drop of a hat will end and coalition building will no longer resemble an auction. Hopefully, Nirvachan Sadan too is convinced of the idea.

Generation Next

The next round of economic reforms should flow from conviction, not crisis

Edits Promises and prescriptions have far outnumbered actions in the eight-year history of India's economic reforms. So it's difficult not to be cynical about yet another discussion paper on the "second generation of economic reforms" promised by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee this past week. Especially so since the paper will carry the stamp of a caretaker government. Yet the proposed paper can make a difference, and thus be more useful than its predecessors, if it is careful about the whats and hows of future reforms. Already, the five thrust areas of the second generation reforms hinted at by Vajpayee are not what economic observers or businessmen think they should be. Elimination of red tape, greater attention to agriculture and small-scale industry, foreign investment, improved corporate governance and better education are the areas the discussion paper is likely to cover. This leaves out two of the toughest unfinished reforms -- privatisation and revision of labour laws.

The government may justify the oversight by claiming that these are part of the incomplete first generation reforms. But that would be quibbling over semantics. Reforms are moving targets, each reform creates scope for more changes. The second generation must address all those reforms that the so called first generation did not or could not. In framing the budget for 1999-2000 the BJP has demonstrated its ability to prepare a future-oriented document. The reason why it was cleared by all political parties without a single change is because the budget proposed changes that were desirable, feasible and yet politically correct. After all, the bane of India's economic reforms is that they have been crisis-driven and, therefore, piecemeal. The true worth of Vajpayee's promised discussion paper would be in making reforms strategy-driven and therefore comprehensive.

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