Why some good people in India do not join electoral politics?
Answers
Answer:
As must be obvious to many of you by now, getting people actively involved & thinking about politics is something very close to my heart. So last fortnight when a young professional asked me, “Why don’t “good people” get into politics?” I thought this was worth a post. To avoid a side-argument on who are “good people”, let me hastily clarify that “good people” is just a broad, handy label that includes accomplished, professionally successful women & men of integrity willing to commit a significant part of their life to public service.
Back to the question. A week earlier, I ran a poll on my blog which threw up some interesting data on this question. Almost half the respondents cited 2 main factors: “Family Responsibilities” and “Loss of Income”. Family responsibilities are of course personal (and vary widely) so I cannot really comment but I guess they are at least partly linked to the second reason cited: “Loss of Income”.
In the world of venture capital & start-ups, we have a popular phrase: “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!”. It has more than a grain of truth in it. And that is probably a major reason why otherwise very successful, talented and sincere individuals do not even consider politics as a career option. It simply does not pay.
Not that such individuals are looking for fat pay-packets. But they expect to be able to maintain a certain standard of living & fulfill their family responsibilities. The salary that MPs and MLAs get leaves no room for that.
Today, India’s finest women & men shun politics like a plague. The present set-up has no attraction for the genuinely public-minded individuals. Many such individuals branch off into social causes or charities instead. That has to change. A good beginning in this direction would be to have a significantly better rewards and incentives structure in place. But better rewards and incentives are only part of the story.
We then need to work on the far bigger challenge of dismantling “barriers to entry”. The first of these is the enormous amount of money that is now required to contest almost any MLA or MP election.
The second are the “built-in” incentives in the system for corruption and unethical behaviour that make accomplished individuals simply uninterested in representing us as political leaders.
The “incentive” is the extraordinary control politicians enjoy over large part of public finances and public assets. The “compulsion” for unethical behaviour comes in the form of huge huge amount of money needed to contest any decent-sized election. Of course, there are limits on electoral expenses. These are routinely violated & expenses are under-reported as a matter of course . A particularly egregious example is the “expenditure” incurred by ex Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan on Salman Khan’s meetings in his constituency.
Since the limits are so low (& fly in the face of reality), the only way anyone realistically stands a chance of winning is by lying about the amount of money they spent on the campaign. As fellow activist Nixon Fernando mentioned, “We have effectively set up a gate post in politics (which says) ‘you have to be dishonest to enter’.”
In the words of my friend, Sanjeev Sabhlok, “the qualifications for being given a ‘ticket’ to contest elections are: possession of a modest intellect, capped with serious moral defects, the ability to play fast and loose with public money, close association with genuine, mafia-type criminals and ability to threaten honest candidates to prevent them from contesting elections”.
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