Comment

Unless the high court intervenes again and sets a deadline for completing the election to the BBMP, it looks like you may have to stop thinking about an elected civic body for a long time. Not that the court deadlines have mattered so far; all those with a vested interest in not having an elected body have managed to skirt around the time frame set by the courts by using proper legal devices.

It is pretty simple. By drafting rules and procedure in such a way that it can be legally challenged, you can be reasonably sure of postponing an election, as in the case of BBMP, for a good three years and, perhaps, longer. The last bit in the dragging-the-feet policy was the manner in which reservation of wards for scheduled castes was drawn up. It was bound to be questioned and the very basic approach of determining which ward ought to be reserved was challenged in the courts giving the government a legitimate excuse to put off elections again.

Now that the case is back from the Supreme Court, one can be reasonably certain that the state will seek time from the high court to draw up a revised reservation matrix for wards as it was the high court which stuck down the reservation of wards and also set a fresh deadline for completion of the election. It would be impossible to complete the process of drawing up a fresh list of reserved wards before February 1, the day the civic elections were scheduled to be formally notified and the process — notification, time allowed for objections, and so on — will surely take a good three months or so.

You can’t, however, be sure that BBMP will have elected representatives soon after that because there are enough convenient and reasonable excuses for the government to keep postponing elections. The first of these is that the examination season begins sometime in March/April — not a good time for elections at all. Then, by the end of May you will have the monsoon season that will surely last till September; so no question of polls then either. Some time in November and December would be pretty convenient time. By then, if circumstances still do not favour the ruling party, you can be sure it will find some excuse or the other.

If you were to ask whether elections have never been held between March and September, the answer would be yes but not in similar circumstances. Given half a chance, the political establishment — all parties included in that — will happily avoid elections if there is some other process through which they can remain relevant and powerful, capable of distributing patronage.

That is all that matters for them. Even within their own organisations, elections are never held or, if held, they’re a sham because positions are either given by a high command or a consensus is arrived at, completely eliminating choice. That is true of the Congress as much as it is of the BJP. KS Eswarappa was chosen as president not by an electoral college but by party seniors in the ruling party, which is really not different from Deshpande being appointed KPCC president by the Congress high command.

If that is the state of internal affairs in the party, it is even more inconvenient for all political parties to deal with urban voters.

Urban voters tend to be pretty demanding and expect an elected representative to be answerable. That is the last thing politicos want. If they can carry on doing things in your name without ever having to bother to pause and ask you what is good for you, so much the better for them though it is so much the worse for you.For them, the principle of accountability is like swine flu — to be avoided at all costs.