Primary codes

It is the sport of the season, to look westwards to the United States and make a wish-list of all the pieces of its electoral process that India could gainfully import. The underlying yearning in this is to somehow have our elections be more inclusive. This has been happening meaningfully in the past couple of decades with greater participation in the elections of people from sections of the population that had been kept on the fringes of political power. But there is another sense in which electoral democracy needs to be deepened and made more inclusive. In the sense that elections elicit the will of the people, there has to be greater inclusion of ordinary people, of voters, in working out the way in which elections are conducted and in pressuring political parties to be accountable for the choices they offer.

Unease stems from this sense that political parties are not responsive enough to voters8217; demand that they be attentive to the candidates they put up for elections, that they institute enough procedures to allow 8220;good8221; candidates to make bids for tickets. American-style primaries are obviously difficult to transplant in as multi-party a parliamentary system as India8217;s; but our colourful elections need to be liberated from the back-room deal-making that8217;s believed to precede candidate lists. Some victories have been won in this regard. For instance, the Supreme Court order that all candidates file affidavits declaring their financial and criminal records, an activity that promises immense vicarious thrills as voters imagine the private lives of the politically powerful, but one that also alerts the party bosses that they are to be held accountable for background checks on their candidates. Also, the anecdotal victory won in 2005, when

Nitish Kumar was pressured into promising that he would not induct into his council of ministers anyone with a known criminal past.

Many of these victories have accrued from the initiatives of a group of professors from the Indian Institutes of Management. Such initiatives are valuable. But these are incremental victories. For a quicker deepening of accountability, there needs to be an overture from the political class to civil society to begin reforms in a way that is non-partisan and self-sustaining.