It is painful to think that people across India identify Goa with the slogan ‘Think defections, think Goa’. For a long time we had harboured the illusion that defections in Goa was an anomaly, that normal politics was ethical, driven by public interest, and inhabited by selfless ‘social workers’. This we now realise is a myth. Defections is the new normal in Goa. We have had defections since the last 35 years, across all assembly sessions, parties, religions, education levels, castes, classes, and genders. The grim conclusion therefore is that religion, gender, education, or wealth are not constraints on defections in Goa.
The factors that aid defections:
In previous articles I had suggested that we must go beyond seeing defections as a failure of public and personal ethics and explain it instead by looking at sociological and structural factors. The following are some I had identified. The first is the erosion of India’s federal character which has resulted in a weakening of the autonomy of states and has shifted the locus of power from Panjim to Delhi. Imperial Delhi clearly directs Goa’s politics.
The second is the replacement of the ‘two local party competitive system’ by a ‘two national party competitive system’ further shifting real power to Delhi. Make no mistake the High Command runs the state’s politics.
Added to the party system is the electoral system, the third factor, where the first past the post (FPTP) system rewards candidates who have secured a minority of registered votes with election. Perhaps, at the level of the assembly, the FPTP electoral system needs to be replaced by a proportional representation (PR) system.
The FPTP system allows the size of assembly constituencies which are small, the fourth factor, to be effectively ‘managed’. Managing a constituency requires the MLA to acquire the power to permit violations of the law and to build vote banks, etc. Managing a constituency involves making concessions to special interests. In Goa this has become an art form.
This art of management has in some cases, the fifth factor, produced ‘constituency capture’ where irrespective of which party the MLA belongs to, he/she will get re-elected. These are the strongmen of Goan politics who have enormous muscle and money power to deploy in constituency capture.
The final factor is the failure of our ‘deliberative’ and ‘oversight’ institutions to check such behaviour. These institutions which are the bedrock of any democracy have become infirm. When this happens, democracy become pathological.
Since institutions, according to one of its leading thinkers, Douglas North, are rules of the game they are supposed to discipline behaviour bringing it into line with democratic norms. If behaviour is deviant, it must get penalised by institutions imposing these penalties.
Laws and Ethics:
Despite these structural and historical factors defections are about public ethics. Representative democracy is based on the principle that voters select their representatives on the basis of a manifesto offered by the candidate at the time of election. It is an implicit contract between the elected representative and the voter, a core feature of representative democracy. When a representative defects, without resigning and re-contesting, this implicit contract is violated. Voters are betrayed. The political and ethical link between voter and representative is thereby broken.
This unethical betrayal by MLAs was the concern of the national parliament that enacted, in 1985, the 52nd Amendment to the Constitution (known as the 10th Schedule) to prohibit defections while still retaining the freedom of expression of the MLA. The 91st Amendment was introduced to reduce the number of cabinet positions in any government and make defections less attractive. There has been considerable litigation in the High Court and even in the Supreme Court but, as the recent defections in Goa show, these have done little to stop such unethical behaviour of MLAs.
What next?
It is clear from the last 35 years that both institutions and laws have failed us. While we can tinker more with the 52nd Amendment to refine the law to make it harder to defect, the answer cannot be found only in law. It lies elsewhere. We need to re-work our democracy. As God said to Digamber: ‘I have no role here it is you, the people, alone who have to decide’. I offered some suggestions earlier on the role people can play such as the flooding of the High Court with PILs, increasing RTI requests to expose MLA misdeeds, changing from FPTP to PR for assembly elections, and instituting an ‘MLA Report’ Card. Perhaps we also need to return to the ‘two local party competitive system’ as in Tamil Nadu. Can that happen in Goa?
(Peter Ronald deSouza is the DD Kosambi Visiting professor at Goa University)
