Don’t vote for Lok Sabha candidates who talk about civic issues. They are duping you

We simply do not know anyone who will not be corrupt. The purpose of a democracy is to build a system that is less prone to corruption by design because it is decentralised.

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint Team

A quick scan of campaign speeches by candidates and social media posts by voters, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, reveals a strange and troubling story: voters seem to think incumbent MPs should be rated on what they have “achieved” for their constituency. And politicians, because they respond to incentives, go around campaigning on these very issues with no regard for whether those issues fall within the domain of the office they are running for.

The media, whose job it is to educate citizens, has also started to track constituency-level civic infrastructure issues and tie these to incumbents. Issues like drinking water, quality of local roads, garbage collection, flooding, et al have become issues that voters discuss and seek improvements on, to which candidates contesting Lok Sabha elections have been responding. Incumbents list what they have done or tie themselves to the work of the state government if the party they belong to also happens to be the party in power at the state level. Opponents attack the incumbents on these very issues.

There are several problems with this. Firstly, a candidate seeking to become your MP is seeking to be your representative in Parliament. That is a legislative job. You send your MP to voice your opinion in lawmaking, which is the primary purpose of a Parliament. It is not an executive function. Lawmaking and the implementation of said laws are distinct and different in a rules-based democracy; that they are different is one of the core features of our system. Secondly, the MP belongs to the legislative branch of the Union government. Most civic infrastructure issues fall within the domain of state and local governments. This means your MP is not just in the wrong branch of government when it comes to dealing with these issues; she belongs to a different government entirely—one that does not own the responsibilities of civic infrastructure issues across any of its branches.

The problems stemming from this corruption and leakage of powers – both in terms of the layer of government and branch of government – are significant and serious. Firstly, let’s assume the MP is magically able to influence the local bureaucracy and or the local government to achieve what the constituents want. What that means, by definition, is that the MP has usurped the functions of state and local governments into her office. This usurpation is the antithesis of what an effective and democratic version of a federated government should look like, given they exist to achieve decentralisation and separation of powers. Voters are supposed to hold each layer of government and each branch of government accountable in different ways and across different elections. This usurpation robs that oversight and rolls up everything into a single candidate. This makes the MP akin to a medieval chieftain, not a legislator in a government of the people with checks and balances, where people can change any one part they think isn’t working while retaining others.

Wider impact of usurpation of powers

The consequences of this usurpation aren’t merely abstract. When a wrong layer of government, which spans a wider segment of people, usurps the functions of a narrower and localised layer of government, it renders policymaking suboptimal by definition. A classic example is the Union government taking over the functions of health and education. The state of Kerala has an infant mortality rate (IMR) of 5—same as the USA—and near-universal literacy. These are comparable to rich OECD countries. Madhya Pradesh had an IMR of 48—same as Afghanistan—and a very poor gross enrollment rate in schools. By usurping the state’s powers over these, the Union government has tasked itself with governing the USA and Afghanistan with the same policy in health and education. That is impossible. An MP usurping the functions of the executive at the state and local government level is exactly the same problem, albeit on a smaller scale.

The other problem with the usurpation of powers by the next layer of government is: this is exactly what leads to corruption. Politicians famously like to call everyone but themselves corrupt. This is posturing; we know it, and they know it. And they do this anyway because it takes a megalomaniac to be a politician. But serious people know that all humans yield to temptation. And all humans seek greater power and greater glory for themselves. None of us are saints. And we respond to incentives and the environment we find ourselves in.

So the job of a democracy is not to pick a more virtuous man or woman. We simply have no way to judge that, and we simply do not know anyone who will not be corrupt. Instead, the purpose of a democracy is to build a system that is less prone to corruption by design because it is decentralised, and no one person or group of people has the power to decide unilaterally. This decentralised and often adversarial approach to decision-making is what will yield an equilibrium both in terms of outcomes and decision-making consistency that’s not influenced by buying off a single person or a small coterie.

For example, decisions that are adversarial in two different places across two different jurisdictions will yield two different results. The job of a democracy is to slowly allow that experimentation and converge to the better results-yielding decisions over time. What decentralisation allows is for this framework to exist as a natural experiment. What usurpation of power does is, it kills that natural experiment and puts the onus on the ‘strong leader’. It’s a model that is bound to fail in the long term.

So, if you want development in your constituency and want to vote on that basis: ask yourself what development is. And ask yourself which layer of government is, and ought to be, responsible for that development. And if you cannot find a good way to achieve that after sifting through the manifestos, the answer is to vote for whichever party promises greater decentralisation from the Union towards state and local governments. That means the Union, under this party’s government, will devolve greater funds and powers to local and state governments. Which we can then influence when elections for those governments come about.

Democracy is not an easy or satisfying sport. It takes time and patience to get the process right, merely in the hope that the right process will yield right results over the long term. We do this because, as Churchill famously quipped, all other forms of government are even worse.

Nilakantan RS is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide. He tweets @puram_politics. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)