IN the historical records of Indian elections, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) will have a special place. No single voluntary organization has perhaps done more to clean up politics and empower voters. Efforts by ADR have led to criminal records, educational qualifications and financial assets of candidates being put up for scrutiny. The opaque electoral bond scheme by which companies could anonymously fund parties for elections has also been cracked open, allowing its camouflaged transactions to be in full view. And, most recently, the Election Commission’s intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar was subject to close questioning and scrutiny.
These battles have been doughtily fought in the courts over the years with a thoroughness and persistence that has been difficult to dismiss. As happens in court, outcomes have taken time to arrive. But ADR’s hallmark has been to be meticulous and do the distance. It has steered clear of slogans on the streets.
Undoubtedly, ADR’s low-key style flows from its founders — management professors setting out to inject transparency into the affairs of the state so that politicians and bureaucrats can be watched more closely and held to account. How successful they have been is seen in the seminal changes they have brought about.
But that they have caught the imagination of citizens became visible when one of the founders, Prof. Jagdeep Chhokar, passed away recently. Tributes poured in from all over the country with even feckless national papers carrying obituaries. An auditorium in Delhi was packed to capacity with admirers paying their last respects.
Prof. Chhokar, always a team player, did much of the heavy lifting and purposed the legal action that ADR took up. We, in this magazine, first met him for a long interview in 2019 at his apartment in New Friends Colony in Delhi. The elections were just over and we felt this was the time to talk about what all had changed.
From that first meeting, over time, Prof. Chhokar became a friend. He wrote a column for Civil Society for several months dealing with thought-provoking issues and greatly enriching our editorial offering. It was admirable that he could be intense, passionate and engaged and yet stand clear of grand flourishes and displays of self-importance.
For all the weighty and complex concerns that he devoted himself to, he was not devoid of quiet humour. In an understated way he was witty and always up for a laugh. He was fun to be with. It is not easy to find activists who aren’t weighed down by the causes they espouse. But Prof. Chhokar was masterly at not making much of himself.
‘Fearless’ was a word repeatedly used to describe him at the condolence meeting in Delhi. You have to be brave to take up the causes ADR has and Prof. Chhokar was unflinching in looking vested interests in the eye. But an aversion to being boring seemed to keep him from wearing his courage on his sleeve. He realized that reforming public life in India was a long haul full of stops and starts. It couldn’t be the work of one organization or set of individuals.
“The way the country has gone in the past 10 years, it will take 50 years to bring it back to its original institutions and values. You are welcome to try if you want to but it will make no difference,” he said with a laugh in one of our casual conversations.
But it was in citizen action that he believed. “You may not be in competitive electoral politics, but you are in politics. Every citizen is in politics,” he said to us in the context of people joining politics to reform it.
It was “theoretically possible” to reform the system from within. But the challenge would be in making those choices that didn’t perpetuate the system.
“Today, Indian politics is such that anyone who has entered politics, competitive electoral politics, gets swept away. Once you are in the fish bowl you have to rely on the same feed that everyone else uses,” he said.
He remembered meeting Aruna Roy in his office at IIM Ahmedabad in 2000 and saying to her: “Look, politics is a very dirty game and I have nothing to do with politics.” And she said: “You cannot say you are not in politics. You are in politics even if you don’t vote. You are in politics because you are allowing somebody to vote for you.”
It was after much consideration that Prof. Chhokar agreed to join his colleagues in forming ADR because it was not what “professors like us” should be doing. But once he crossed over, he gave it all he had.
“All parties, without exception, are upset with us,” he said, emphasizing it was important not to get aligned if systemic change was the goal. ADR’s cases showed that when it came to money and power, politicians, irrespective of persuasion, were on the same side.
Incredibly, at the age of 58, Prof. Chhokar decided to study law, sharing space with students half his age. He was 81 when he passed away on September 12. Ill health in one form or another had crept up on him as invariably it does with age. But he remained sprightly, alert and you could even say young in presence. When we met last in Panjim, he got into his small car after a few drinks in the evening and drove us with his wife, Kiran, to the boulevard by the Mandovi. He was drawn by the insouciance of Goa and, of course, its cleaner air. He had joyously made the transition from the NCR and felt we should too.