What has been called the Greatest Indian Show by many writers is finally over. But I call it the Greatest Indian Tamasha because it was a Tamasha and nothing more. A Tamasha is any show that is meant to delude and entertain the audience and that is exactly what our elections always have been doing ever since we started having them almost sixty years ago.

It is wrong to say that the politicians who were the pioneers of our democracy, whom we all hold in high esteem as its pillars, were a class above our present ones. No, not at all. Most of them too were just as selfish, just as unpatriotic and just as evil as our present day ones. But the only difference was that the magnitude of corruption then was much smaller for the simple reason that they were not as bold and brazen as they are now. The only reason for this slight hesitation in making hay while the sun was shining was because they were not yet sure that their crimes would go unpunished.

New - found boldness:
Their new - found boldness that we see today came when they quickly realised that while their crimes paid well, we the voters, would never really make them pay for them. Apart from renewing the permit of the same set of corrupt politicians to delude us into believing that we are being governed, while enriching themselves, our most expensive election exercise achieves nothing more year after year.

The only time when it did the impossible was in 1977, soon after the Emergency, when the masses by an unprecedented mass action, overthrew the Congress government and brought in a new one. But it was unfortunate that the men and women who manned the new government thought that the fruits of their victory would last without their working unitedly for the good of the nation.

If you look at how we have been conducting our elections and what our whole elaborate election exercise has been doing for us, you will realise that it is indeed an exercise in futility. We will for the moment leave aside the way we have been voting and what the persons we elect do for us. After every election, big or small, we make a hue and cry that our names are left out of the voters’ lists as we are doing right now. We claim to be one of the most developed third - world countries and the biggest democracy, at least by virtue of our voting population, but over the past sixty years we have not been able to create a fool - proof multi - purpose identity card for our citizens that can serve as a reliable marker of our citizenship.

Is it not a crying shame that in this era when of our software engineers with the skills at their fingertips are steering the rest of the world towards the stars, we are still seeing stars with ink smudges on our fingertips? Why are we not able to have a national database with all details of every citizen that can do away with shoddy voters’ lists?

When countries in the Middle East, which had not seen an asphalted road or even an electric bulb till as late as the early fifties, can provide data encoded biometric identity cards for their citizens and also for their huge population of expatriate workers today, why are we unable to do the same? When we make such a fuss over stemming illegal entrants into the country, can we not do it by providing similar cards to our citizens and then insisting that these cards be produced at every situation that demands proof of identity?

Phased manner:
If we had started this process in a phased manner, State – by - State, when the computer era came of age about a decade and a half ago, the process would have been complete by now for the whole country. It would have been of great help not only during our elections but also for all other transactions while ensuring national security. I think the age of living without an identity should certainly end now for a nation as great as ours.

Coming to the paranoid activity that we all saw, of tracking bank transactions and truant vehicles, in trying to stem the flow of illegal money and liquor to buy votes, it has always been and will continue to be a futile exercise. All it achieved was to give us an impression that something unprecedented was being done to ensure fairness while all those with unfair ambitions achieved theirs. The same officers whom we saw strutting and fuming under the transient powers granted by the Election Commission will in just a week’s time be bowing before the very same politicians they threatened and thwarted and will soon be bending backwards to break rules under their orders.

There are many other democratic countries all over the world that hold elections regularly but they do not do so in such a mad frenzy as we are doing now. There should be a method and purpose in all this madness and our rules should make sense and be implementable. While the Election Commission permits the spending of just Rs. 25 lakh per constituency many candidates have openly admitted that they have spent at least Rs. 25 crores each.

This means that the total amount of money seized all over our State in this effort, that strained and stressed our bureaucracy and Police force, was much less than what would have been spent by most of the parties or candidates for one consistuency.

Unlawful efforts:
Despite all the lawful efforts of the Election Commission to get the voters to the booths fearlessly and all the unlawful efforts of the candidates to lure them with cash and cheap liquor, we witnessed an unusually low turnout during the recent polls.

Over the past few days while examining them as a doctor, I have been asking all my patients without ink smudge on their fingers why they had not voted. Their answers were surprisingly candid and thought - provoking.

While most elderly people said that they were disillusioned with the whole process and its failure to make any meaningful change to their existence, most of the youngsters said that they desperately wanted to vote and make a difference but could not find their names in the voters’ lists.

Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem
kjnmysore@rediffmail.com
Courtesy: Star of Mysore