When the district election officer declared Mukesh Dalal as the winner of the Surat Lok Sabha constituency, he became the first representative to be elected to the yet-to-be-inaugurated 18th Lok Sabha. Dalal won unopposed. In competitive multiparty systems, this is a rare event, and not surprisingly, it raised a lot of eyebrows. It was then revealed that the nomination papers of the primary challenger, the Congress candidate, were rejected. The papers of the Congress substitute candidate had been rejected earlier, and the others in the fray, including the Bahujan Samaj Party nominee, withdrew their names.
A couple of days later, in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh, the Congress candidate for the Indore Lok Sabha seat withdrew his candidature on the last day to pull out of the fray. This left the Congress without a candidate in the contest. However, the Surat incident couldn’t be replicated as the Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist) dug its heels in by refusing to withdraw.
This travesty of electoral democracy raises two issues that deserve closer attention. The BJP has been winning Surat and Indore unceasingly and handsomely over nine Lok Sabha elections since 1989, and more often than not, the party has received more than 50 per cent of the votes. Comparative studies show that parties tamper with electoral processes w hen they want to win/maintain power at any cost or when the race is too close to call. However, this does not help us understand why the party attempts to do so in states like Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, where its standing is undisputed.
The first issue then is why does the party need to influence the process? What does it seek to achieve? Is there anything beyond winning elections that matters?
The BJP is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. It has had to invent ways to better its own attempts to stay in the front, and these manoeuvres have often pushed ethical boundaries. The Surat incident may serve the ends of the party but is not necessarily in the spirit of democracy.
Travesties such as Surat are a signalling device and we need to look beyond elections to make full sense of them. The party has two audiences, one internal, which includes party cadre and supporters and the other is external, which includes other political parties, their supporters, and the general public.
Various commentators have repeatedly underlined over the last couple of months that the BJP has maxed out in its traditional stronghold states. Consequently, the party has been setting targets like obtaining 50 per cent of votes and winning 400 seats. These goals and targets are intended to enthuse the party cadre in the states where the party faces feeble challengers, and there is nothing left to win in terms of seats. Now, what happens in states like Gujarat, where the party has already been hitting these targets?
The thrill of dismantling a competitor without a contest can give the party cadre a heady feeling. It makes the party appear commanding, forceful, and uncompromising. Being part of an organisation that is continually focused on achieving its goals gives workers and supporters a sense of purpose and involvement. Party supporters and members can then believe they are part of an extraordinary force capable of doing anything. This also serves to maintain the leadership status-quo in the party as no one wants to break a winning run.
At the same time, such instances also send a message to those outside, including allies and competing parties, and their supporters and followers. They help in muscle flexing, besides acting as a distracting mechanism. For the public, Congress appears weak, a party that cannot keep its flock together. Internally, the effects can be devastating; while the party is forced to spend resources on firefighting, it also sows seeds of distrust. It increases suspicion, as the gel that binds the party — trust — is thrown out of the window.
On the face of it, candidates voluntarily withdrawing nominations and papers being rejected on technical grounds is not an infraction of the law, especially when there are no formal complaints of harassment or wrongdoing. Further, it is not necessarily an electoral fraud in the league of booth-capturing, intimidating voters, stuffing of ballot boxes, and impersonation, which marred the conduct of free and fair elections in the past. Unlike these blatant violations, where there is a clear party linkage, here there is no direct connection with the party. The party cannot be blamed as it has not violated any procedures.
This brings us to the second lesson that the Surat incident throws up. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their magisterial How Democracies Die (2018), note, the contemporary weakening of democracy does not take place through overt, bold, and theatrical subversion tactics like coups but by turning democracy against itself by using the rules and institutions in place. The undermining occurs at the margins, where regulations are breached but not necessarily overthrown. There is no crossing the line; instead, on the contrary, there is an attempt to pay constant homage to the law and the Constitution.
The Surat incident extends the ongoing “lawfare” — the use of legal instruments to check political opponents. Since this battle is couched in technical language and relies on the letter of the law, it appears innocuous to most people. Moreover, the party can claim high moral ground — that it sticks to procedural correctness. However, in practice, the supposed respect for the law often violates its spirit and thus contributes to the gradual erosion of democratic norms.
For a party that has defeating the opposition at any cost as its primary goal, any slip is a loss. A victory, without crushing the opposition and with lower numbers, will be read as a deficit. We know how a person is elected, unopposed or not, does not make any difference to the seats won. There is no special seat or position in parliament for candidates winning with “record” majorities. However, when attributed with symbolic meaning, a mere technical issue can get a life of its own. When winning unopposed demonstrates the ability to utilise power without scruples, it may boost the party’s strength, but it diminishes democracy in the process, as it leads to the erosion of a shared understanding of what makes institutions work.
The writer is with the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad. Views expressed are personal
