Tamil Nadu Voters : A Dash for Cash?

      Tamils are criticized again, for a familiar reason in a familiar season.  It was the feverish run-up to the 2016 State assembly polls held early this week in Tamil Nadu.  And it was the widespread distribution of cash to voters, credited to two major political forces, to buy votes in advance of the polls. So Tamils are blamed for unashamedly selling their solemn democratic rights for cash.  But they may have our sympathies, though surely not support.

Legally you cannot show that Tamil Nadu's two leading political parties, DMK and ADMK, arranged delivery of cash to large sections of voters during the last assembly polls, though these parties may stand accused.  When cash for votes was flowing in torrents, how did the two parties react? Each of them just blamed the other as the culprit. But both of them never appealed to the public to refuse cash for votes whoever might be offering!

     You know, many elected representatives and many government servants in India pocket cash for doing their official duty or for showing illegal favours in return. How is it different from the general public accepting cash and promising to vote for a political party? You know that too. People’s representatives and government servants given to corrupt ways demand, through clear words or signals, illegal money from the public or from businessmen for normally doing routine things or for specially taking wrong decisions. Here the prime mover is the receiver.  In cash for votes, the prime mover is the giver.  This evil debuted in Tamil Nadu during a bye-election to Thirumangalam assembly constituency in 2009 when a political party extensively introduced the technique of offering cash to voters to bag their votes.  From then on this election strategy acquired a scientific name, as “Thirumangalam Formula”.

      Was it entirely upto the Tamil Nadu voters to refuse any cash offered and turn away all bribe-givers, so that if none was prepared to receive no political party would be willing to pay? In cold theory, yes.  But look at a few connected things. 

       A bribing political party of Tamil Nadu chooses its preys well and they are in large numbers.  A briber will not knock at the door of a palatial house or other decent houses whose inmates are somewhat well off and who don’t look like putting out their hands to cash for votes.  Those who receive it, whether it is Rs.200, Rs.500 or more, are people to whom that money means quite a bit in their lives, but they are not stealing.  The target voters sense, consciously or subconsciously, that cash for votes comes from those who have amassed wealth in dubious ways, even as the poor voters are struggling.  So voters will feel it is not wrong to receive that money, or even to ask for a little more.  This phenomenon is similar to tax payers concealing their incomes when the income tax rates are unfairly high, but complying with tax laws voluntarily when the tax rates are reasonable.  Different expropriations produce different responses.

Corruption levels are high in Tamil Nadu.  Many say it could be the topper among all States on the corruption index.  Ordinary people of the State cannot fight that curse.  Receiving cash for votes, from those connected to the corrupt, is a petty solace and justification they may have in their financial status.  When the government doesn’t play democracy to its people, in the form of a clean administration at the minimum, don’t expect the people to play democracy in perfect ways.  But generally the Tamil population are a good lot, and I guess they would even feel bad to say it out that they are justified in doing an apparently shameful act.  They are generally honest too.  I know of many house maids in Tamil Nadu who will take cash offered during election time, but would not touch a ten-rupee note lying anywhere in the homes they work even if nobody is looking.

India is not a mature democracy yet, but is getting better over time.  Its judiciary has been more active in recent years, granting reliefs in public interest cases and checking executive excesses.  Its Central Election Commission does a good job, far better than earlier times, conducting free and fair elections to Parliament and State Legislatures.  Its newspapers and television channels are generally independent, though some of them could be more responsible. People have shown they could pack off a non-performing central government when they unseated the long-entrenched Congress Party in the last Parliamentary elections.  But one body in the country which has gone from good to bad and to worse is its political class and the government they provide, especially in the States.  

      The top brass of the Indian political class and its governments across India operate in stealth and seclusion, and it is hard to correct their ways.  It is the political class which is the receiver of bribes at government level (government servants follow them) and the payer of bribes to voters at election time.  When villainous politicians do not change, or cannot be made to change in a largely uninformed society, blaming the givers in government transactions or receivers at election time is barking up the wrong tree.   For now, our trust and hope can only be on the people and their inherent goodness to bring pressures for change on the politicians.  Yes, it will take time.

Back to the present day. A government official receiving bribes differs from a voter receiving cash in another crucial way.  The person who bribes a government official gets things done for the deal-money paid.  In cash for votes, the bribe giver cannot know if the voter promising to vote for someone really voted for that person or for another candidate of the voter’s choice.  Also, the voter may have already decided to vote for a political party, and do it exactly.  But before polling he may still take cash from that party’s agent giving a promise to vote as directed, and from the agent of the rival party too giving a different promise.  Here the voter does not ‘sell’ his vote. 

I guess that most of Tamil Nadu voters in the 2016 elections have not sold their votes.  And I guess that when they decided to grab the cash, there was a feeble murmur in their inner hearts, “Let the incorrigible rascals cough up a drop of their bad money”.  Make your guess.

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Copyright © R. Veera Raghavan 2016