In the Iowa caucus there was no clear winner among the Democrats. The Democrat front runner, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was ahead by a mere whisker, while in the Republican field, where Real Estate magnate Donald Trump was expected to pull through easily, Ted Cruz, who has been in politics for just about three years won. It’s not the end for any of the frontrunners in both parties, but the results of this caucus are an indication that the candidate that the party thinks is best is not necessarily what the people consider best. The primaries even go against what the people In the US political system of choosing candidates, the high command is the party worker. The candidates are not imposed by the party, it is the people who decide who should be the candidate.
That is so unlike India, where the system of primaries does not exist. Here, at election time the candidate is selected by the party, possibly by a committee that decides who among the potential candidates has the best chances of winning. The ‘winnability’ factor of a candidate, as deemed by the party, is what wins the candidate the party ticket. Far too often the party high command decides who should be the candidate even when the local party office recommends another.
Elections in Goa will be held within the next 12 months. They are due in March 2017, but there are indications that they could be held as early as in December this year. In the months to come the parties in the State will begin the process to select candidates for the polls, but it will be a rare case where the grassroots workers are involved in the selection. Potential candidates are already beginning to position themselves, hoping that the party brass will notice them and award them with tickets to contest the election. Nowhere in the picture are the people who will ultimately walk to the polling station and press the button on the electronic voting machine. There is no democracy in the parties that promise to be democratic.
In the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had attempted a process similar to the US primaries to select candidates. It was meant to empower the grassroot workers and leaders to enter the electoral fray, and if it proved successful it would be implemented across the country in future elections. The experiment was a failure as all the candidates in 15 Lok Sabha seats who were selected through direct feedback from party workers lost. But there appeared to be a flaw in this experiment as most of the candidates that were selected by the system were already Members of Parliament, senior party leaders or their relatives or associates, giving rise to charges of corruption even here.
While the corruption in the selection may have defeated the purpose of the experiment in 2014, the failure should not mean that primaries are not the best method of choosing a candidate. Instead of discarding primaries as a means to select candidates, what needs to be done is iron out the flaws in the process of the 2014 experiment so that there can be a better model on which to work on in the future. That would really mean giving power to the people to select who should be the candidate in their constituency. This is something that the parties will be contesting the elections to the Goa Legislative Assembly should consider before they begin their process of selecting candidates. Only in this manner will the parties be truly democratic in their functioning.
