Some dignity, please

What is it about Indian politicians that, more often than not, they act with scant regard for dignity""not just their own but of the citizen, the government, and the state? It does not seem to occur to them that low cunning, demeaning stratagems and uncivil utterances diminish us all""of course in the eyes of the world but, far more importantly, in our own as well. Why does one feel slightly unclean after each of their rustlings in the bush? It doesn't matter what it is""Anand Sharma, minister of state for external affairs, demanding exemption from airport security checks or the election of a new President""the story is the same: a sense of debasement because of what the country has to put up with. Even if one is willing to disregard the lesser acts of embarrassment""and one should not, because the list extends from trafficking in passports and visas, to taking money for asking questions in Parliament and trading gas connections, so some strict standards need to be imposed""it is saddening that the process of choosing India's new head of state has been reduced to a display of municipal-level politicking.

The exercise should have been conducted discreetly, and with a greater sense of what the exercise of electing a President warrants. At stake, after all, is the authority and the dignity of an office that is supposed to be above political divisions. Both have been compromised by the rolling out of multiple names as possible candidates, only for one after the other to be discarded (causing a lot of personal embarrassment for some political figures of standing), and resulting for the UPA in the 14th-best choice getting accepted. To make matters worse, the sitting President's name has been needlessly roped in, though it is clear that he will not stand because the UPA does not want him to get a second term. And the sitting Vice-President is being encouraged to enter the arena for a gladiatorial contest that, from the beginning, can have only one outcome, with the Vice-President losing. It should not surprise therefore that one acerbic commentator wrote: "...even a tiffin-carrier could become the President of India". That is unfair perhaps, but is it untrue as well?

The problem may lie with the electoral college, which comprises MPs and MLAs who are under the control of their parties, some of which are fighting for ever-increasing stakes""including being invited to form the government after the 2009 elections. If there is no clear majority for any party, the President has to take some vital decisions. Far better then to ensure that your own man, or woman, occupies Rashtrapati Bhavan. There are two ways of approaching this issue. One is to alter the composition of the electoral college so that it loses its purely political character. But that is not about to happen, and in any case will not be desirable. So we could view the exercise as what in game theory is called a cooperative game, which it is because it is being played between coalitions. One of the main problems in cooperative games is the distribution of gains, especially when some members of the coalition contribute more than others. Theorists have suggested ways of ensuring fair distributions. The Election Commission could study these and come up with some ideas.