Electoral politics in South Asia

Elections have been held in the largest democracy of the world, India, setting a good example of a smooth but dramatic change in the government for others to emulate in South Asia. Sri Lanka also went through the exercise of mid-term elections, resulting in a hung parliament and a minority government while resolving the conflict in a diarchy of power between the President and the Prime Minister in favor of the former. Although the elections were held in Pakistan in 2002, in doubtful conditions, transition from a military to civilian rule has yet to be completed. In Bangladesh, although consensus is against extra-constitutional intervention, the two major parties do not follow any democratic convention in as state of perpetual political confrontation. While Nepal, after the dissolution of the parliament in 2002, is embroiled in a serious political crisis and Maoist insurgency, Bhutan and Maldives are still far from becoming a democratic polity.

A close look into the electoral processes and political systems prevalent in South Asia would reveal some major cleavages affecting the character of political formations, participations of the people, inclusion of women, minorities, rural and urban poor, the peripheral regions and sub-national groups into the mainstream. In most cases, the power structures or/and ruling elites in the countries of South Asia dominate the electoral politics, major political parties and the powerful institutions of states. Democracy has in fact become an occasional ritual for the electorates, manipulated by powerful groups, ethnic/caste/religious factors, money and media, without allowing greater participation to the people in day to day democracy and governance. Marriage of crime and politics and use of unfair means, in invariably all countries of the region, have lowered the esteem of public representatives, politics and political parties. Now people with criminal records sit in the legislatures to scoff at rule of law. Use of violence is also quite common reflecting upon the existence of authoritarian tendencies across South Asian societies.

Genuine women representation and the participation of under-privileged, religious and ethnic minorities remain abysmally low in the electoral and representative systems. While greater representation to women has been ensured through a pseudo indirect party-list system of proportional representation in Pakistan, efforts at bringing gender balance in the representative system have yet to succeed in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. No doubt measures have been taken to reduce the role of money in elections, in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the electoral contests are generally won with the excessive glitter of money and the coercive power of local elites. Except for India, where election commission is quite powerful and independent, election authorities are manipulated in one way or the other in other countries. Even though Bangladesh had evolved a very innovative neutral caretaker setup, it is no more above manipulation. To avoid rigging in counting and tempering of ballot, India introduced a computerized system of balloting which should be adopted by other countries in the region to ensure the sanctity of the ballot.

Increasingly, the tribal, caste, ethnic and parochial elements have come to play a greater role in the fortunes of political parties who now increasingly rely on election campaigns that are devoid of substantive issues. Consequently, the participation of the people or turnout in elections is on the decline. Ironically, theses are educated middle and upper classes who shy away from voting as compared to the poor who still have a faith in the ballot to change their plight. Role of the electronic media in elections, especially of opinion and exist polls, has raised serious questions regarding false projections of images and, still worse, forecasts. More importantly, although two/three-party system has been progressively evolving in most countries of South Asia, the mainstream parties have been on the decline in terms of democratic ethos, institutional functioning and programmatic emphasis. Still worse, the role of religious parochialism in politics has substantially increased in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Despite the introduction of one or the other variant of local self-government in all countries of the region, substantive devolution has yet to take place in any of the seven nations. Similarly, perhaps, South Asia has highly centralized political structure. Although most countries are federal, they have not allowed greater autonomy to the federating units, such as in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, that has resulted in tensions and conflicts between a strong federation and weaker federating units. In turn, the states or provinces have not allowed the process of devolution to reach the grassroots level. Consequently, the people at large feel alienated and have no substantive role in governance or development.

This is not surprising that the countries of South Asia are faced with one kind of a political crisis or the other. Democracy is yet to take firm root and democratic culture still far from becoming the norm. Most importantly, the nations of South Asia are still in search of such social contract that could satisfy their people, regardless of gender, faith, ethnicity or religion. The social contract built around Nehru's autarkic socialism or the effort to create around Hindutva in India has failed and is being substituted by the coalition politics that, at another level, is no substitute to cooperative federalism. The Sri Lankan Constitution based on diarchy and exclusion of appropriate participation by the Tamil ethnic minority has not worked resulting in a bloody ethnic conflict. The social contract based on 1973 Constitution in Pakistan has become a victim of successive intervention by the army. Despite the 1990 Constitution, Nepal has yet to decide the contours of its republic and the role of monarchy.

Yet, South Asia can boast of trying to take the road of democracy. The people are not ready to live under authoritarian, exclusionary, non-participatory and centralized systems of governance. There is a lot to learn from each other's experience and it would be better if the parliaments in the countries of South Asia join hands to not only make their systems better, but also create a South Asian Parliament.