Subir Roy: Where's the noise and tamasha?

OFF BEAT/ Elections are not half as exciting as they used to be

Elections are not what they used to be. They are becoming tamer each time, steadily losing all the gusto, exuberance and drama that characterises the hallmark of a vibrant democracy.

If colleagues on the election beat are to be believed, the few places where polls still retain their raw, cutting edge are in good parts of Bihar and the Naxalite-infested areas of Andhra and Jharkhand.

In these places, there is that tingling sensation as polling day dawns. As you set out to vote, you do not know if, eventually, you will be able to.

A bomb may explode ahead of you or right in your face, ending your chances of ever voting again. Even if you arrive safely at the polling booth, you may find tough-looking, macho types telling you not to worry: you needn't have taken the risk and the trouble since they have already voted on your behalf.

On the outside chance that they have not and you are able to vote the way you want to, that is not the end of the excitement. A bomb could still explode in your face on the way back because of your audacity in seeking to exercise your franchise.

If even that does not happen and you are back home safe and sound, you will deservedly feel like a hero who has just returned from a risky expedition the outcome of which was wide open. It is voting in these kinds of elections that offers the acid test of democracy. The right to vote is not easily won and its value can be appreciated and protected only by those who have risked a lot to earn it.

The chief culprit responsible for taking the zing out of elections is, of course, the Election Commission. Over the years, it has been working systematically to tame and domesticate our young and, albeit, slightly- rowdy democracy.

Before the commission had its way, campaigns were so much more colourful and noisy, giving the local boys something to do. Now the strict watch on expenses has put paid to all the exuberance.

The second culprit is the courts. In the old days, crowds would wait late into the night for the hard-pressed netas to come and deliver their bhashan, aided and abetted by the public address system.

These days, the rule that microphones have to go off at 10 p m has not spared even L K Advani. The deputy prime minister was rightly outraged at being asked to stop at the dot of 10. He fumed that this was possible only in Bihar, but the rot goes deeper.

Things have come to such a pass that it has become difficult for public-spirited politicians to even distribute a few saris and dhotis to those who come to hear them. This is an affront to Indian tradition. If you have sinned a lot and earned a lot, the classical Indian penance has been to do a great puja and distribute alms to the poor.

To stop Indian politicians from doing this after they have sought forgiveness from their constituents for neglecting them for five years is to strike at the very root of Indianness. The way things are going, you will soon have election observers doing the rounds of bars to find out which group of young men are bending their elbows, courtesy the campaign budget of some neta.

The imported malaise has really gone deep. Even candidates are no longer chosen the way they used to be. In the old days, a party leadership would distribute nominations to all those who had the capacity to make the most outrageous promises and then, after winning, the ability to deliver on a good part of them.

This is how politicians from A B A Ghani Khan Choudhury to Miss Mamata Banerjee, from Ram Vilas Paswan to Nitish Kumar, built up their fabulous careers.

Today, candidates are actually chosen in a most humiliating manner. I have it on the best authority that the key test is to appear before a casting agency that will put you through a screen test to determine if you look good on the box.

Then you will be put through another round of humiliation by being asked to participate in a mock tele debate. If is only if you look good on television and are able to out-glib-talk your opponents in the debate that you have the chance of winning a ticket.

It is because of this decline in the stuff and substance of elections that I have been forced to stop voting. It is not that I have the vote but don't care to go out and cast it. Such is the decline in the system that in the last couple of elections, the voters' list in my area has not thought it fit to recognise my presence.

It was not always like this. In the old days, be it in Kolkata or Delhi, somebody would come to your house before the elections to revise the list and you had a chance to put your name in if it had been missed out. But in Haryana, during the golden rule of Om Prakash Chautala, entire new areas of Gurgaon were considered too unimportant to be included in the voters' list.

It has been the same in Bangalore. No revision, no visit to the door and, naturally, no name in the list. The garden city has an additional problem. It conducts elections so quietly that, were it not for the newspapers and friends of the BJP yelling that they were storming the Vidhana Soudha, you would know that a campaign was on.

I have seen elections in Britain that were the worst (it was difficult to sight a single poster) and in Japan, where they were a little better (there was the odd street-corner meeting), but I didn't know Bangalore would take its international pretensions so seriously and compete for holding the quietest elections possible.

If things go on like this, then one day, the electoral animal will quietly pass away and nobody will notice it.