The assessed need for group bonding among members of political parties in India is seen to rise at particular moments. It achieves peak salience after state-election exit polls predict a hung legislative assembly, with no party projected to get a clear majority to form a government. Ahead of Thursday’s results, for example, the Congress in Goa reportedly began gathering its candidates under the same roof at a resort. In 2017, it failed to attain power in Panaji despite winning more seats than its rival Bharatiya Janata Party, which got the numbers and took charge. It has become almost routine for parties to corral their seat-hopefuls together at such times. Though these huddles could host policy pow-wows, they are typically fortified affairs aimed at barring defections. Hopping parties has grown common and whispers of secret budgets acting as incentive schemes are said to raise more enquiries than eyebrows. According to a report of the Association for Democratic Reforms, over a span from 2016 to 2020, as many as 443 Indian lawmakers at the central and state levels left their parties to contest polls on rival-party tickets. Like the ‘aaya Ram’ days of the late 1960s, party loyalty appears to have weakened in recent years.
The paradox is that switchovers of allegiance have gained pace at a time of acute political polarization among citizens at large. Chat group ruptures on social media testify to how easily casual chatter can get riven by talk of politics. Friendships have come apart over someone’s nationalism versus the other’s secularism. Even family relations have been strained. Yet, our politicians frequently appear to place themselves above this era’s deep divide of ideology. The usual explanation is also the most cynical: as in Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?, a popular parable on work-life motivation, those who seek public-life careers also pursue their own interest by moving where rewards can be maximized. Parties with better victory ratios and bigger coffers thus have an edge over others in recruitment. That public life ought to be dedicated to our collective well-being is of little consequence in this scheme to things.
India does have an anti-defection law, as we are reminded whenever a squabble erupts over whether a House member should be ejected for rank disloyalty. Ironically, when it was enacted in 1985, its whip-enablers were slammed by critics for violating the spirit of our hard-earned representative democracy—a bustle of leaders elected as voices of their conscience as much as constituents. Party splits, notably, were not banned. The ‘supreme leader’ syndrome feared back then, however, is now in evidence across party lines. Presidential-style elections of B.R. Ambedkar’s reproach are now more or less the norm. This is no surprise in the sound and fury of today’s politics, suffused as it is with media imagery, which converges eyeballs on the few found worthy of attention-spans reduced to bits, and addled by fake forwards taken as actual news online. Such top-heavy wooing of voters is a trend hard to defy. It has vastly diminished both the role and agency of our lawmakers, the individuals from whose confidence every top leader’s power was once expected to derive. And this, arguably, has made space for a live electoral-asset market. No matter how thinly traded it is, that it exists at all reflects poorly on our democracy. It doesn’t take a lab set-up to sniff out the relevance of ‘cheesy’ movements, but an arty story of novel deprivation that’s graphic enough can still vivify the worry.
