For a state which is as small as Goa, it is shocking to see from the depths of the political process, how parties and politicians have no option but to be corrupt. It is a vicious cycle of corruption that begins much before elections and continues through the five years of the next term as those who manage to win, need to recover their spendings to be able to spend before the next election.
Voters have become a commodity and votes a currency
It is as simple as that. Across Goa, parties and candidates no longer think of policies and performance as a challenge. Voting has become trading. This is why the seasoned candidates who contest every or every alternate election or win or lose by small margins, spend absolutely no time and money or marketing, publicity, and so on. They sit down with calculators and booths, or ward-wise voter lists and actually budget for the amounts to be paid per person or family. Therefore, their election preparations are limited and only limited to organising funds to pay voters and other locals who manage those groups of voters. So instead of elections being all about governance or the lack of it, it is all about money. On spending money and receiving money.
It’s a big profit-making festival
It is very well organized. The funds are arranged either through financers or from parties. The candidate arranges enough to cover his voter acquisition project and also make a profit because he needs to plan for the next election, just in case he loses this and remains out of government for the next term.
For established Goan parties, manifestoes, therefore, have become a formality, neither candidates nor voters seem to need it
There are two different worlds in these elections. The official world of manifestoes, issues, campaign speeches. And the world of pre-set voters. If candidates do a quick calculation and “cover” lists and list of voters either directly or through political agents, then in the numbers game, a veteran political fixer or a party which is used to functioning this way can simply fix just the right voters, area, caste or community-wise. In constituencies that have about 30,000 to 35,000 voters and multiple candidates, “pre-reserving” votes through deals is common. Nothing is official but everything is understood.
Why does this happen? Because many voters think of themselves alone, Goa be damned
The silver lining in the cloud is that not all of Goa has been struck by this disease. There are some constituencies which, no matter what, will deliver a result in favour of one person or family. These persons naturally have a hold over any party they chose to contest on. And on a thumb rule, about 25% of Goa’s constituencies follow this pattern. It is a high percentage since these seats become decisive in government formation. In the rest of the seats, too this is not totally absent but they allow for some amount of issue-based and candidate based voting on merit.
How can this change? When people choose candidates on merit who they trust to deliver for Goa
The challenge one faces is to ensure that more and more seats are contested based on the merit of the candidate and the merit of issues raised by them or their parties. It can all change if people decide on issues and draw up people’s manifestoes. We have raised this before on Insight where we recommended People’s Manifestoes at the village level, block level and district level of parties and then have an umbrella state-level manifesto. The approach has to be bottom-up and not top-down.
It is in people’s hands
People need to decide if manifestoes should be copy-paste jobs, as many of them are or they should be real, made by the people. At times the manifestos look so much like each other and also a copy of the previous elections, that parties should be careful at least to change the year.
These manifestoes serve only one purpose. Fool that section of the public which is gullible.
But parties getaway because people do not question or make parties pay for a lazy effort on manifestoes. If they start holding parties to account for failed promises or non-implementation of key points in the manifesto, parties will not only take manifestoes seriously but base their functioning on them.
It will all end if the whole of Goa votes for one clear narrative
If there is a strong all Goa narrative, which could be good governance or secularism, or based on very strong identity, culture and so on and a party is able to shape this narrative well, then it can be hoped that right-thinking Goans will get out of the regular trap of how elections are conducted and buy not the larger narrative.
One reason why that becomes even more difficult, especially in South Goa is that many dedicated sons and daughters of the soil have either left India or have acquired Portuguese passports and cannot vote. Therefore, the voter dynamic has shifted where Goa now has many voters from other states who are settled here. To them, a larger Goan narrative like culture and identity will mean nothing. What will matter more are personal benefits. That is why the vote fixing project becomes more successful.
If good governance and a people-based rule for the next generation of Goans is the objective, then people have to decide to reject the politics of vote fixing and embrace people-based choices that are not dependent on the wealth of notes but on the richness of people’s true aspirations and hopes.
