A wrecking ball is being taken to the basic structure of electoral democracy in India. We have shamelessly crossed over to the dark side with many elected MPs acting in ways that do not reflect the will of those who sent them to Parliament. Instead, they reflect the will of those who are powerful enough to offer financial inducements to lure them and/or make threats that scare them.

This also marks an inflection point in our journey as a constitutional democracy when we must ask a few hard questions. First, what is the point of elections when MPs can be lured and purchased? Sure, it has happened in the past, but what is currently happening is on an unprecedented scale in order to change the constitutional design of India. Second, can we hypothetically end up with a single-party rule, not through military takeovers, elections, or revolutions, but by bribing our way through the system, one regional party after another? It does not seem impossible, even though we would still like to believe that it is improbable.

And finally, like some of our neighbouring countries in South Asia, are we ending up as a managed authoritarian democracy that jails opposition figures and smashes those who dare challenge the Supreme Leader and the Supreme Party? After all, our neighbours do have majoritarian governments, and we, constitutionally, do not, even though the dominant party today seeks to solely represent the Hindu majority and actively mobilise against minorities.

The recent display of the politics of “dadagiri” has an end game: to pass the delimitation-linked reservation Bill that will redraw India’s constituencies and eventually realise the great Hindutva dream of One Nation One Election (presumably under a great “Hindu Hriday Samrat [emperor of Hindu hearts]”). Given the fact that in West Bengal, the state has chosen to publicly parade former legislators described as strongmen, the imagination is medieval, as is the idea of a Hindu nation with leaders frequently engaged in religious ceremonies.

The goal is a nation that flattens all differences and regional variations. It is also fairly self-evident that the need to flex more muscle domestically comes as the stature of the leadership shrivels on the international stage. Manhood is very important to the psychological underpinning of Hindutva—even a hurried reading of V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar would inform us of that. And so, we stand at a point where the dominant political party of India has declared open season on all other parties to shore up its parliamentary number.

It is like playing football or cricket when the referees or umpires allow members of the opposing teams to switch sides mid-match. When no red or yellow cards are shown when players are tripped and fouled or even kicked in the gut. In this case, the referees, umpires, and administrators are metaphorically and literally under the control of the Centre, as seen in the functioning of the Election Commission of India under the current Chief Electoral Officer.

The manner in which so many Trinamool Congress MPs capitulated, crawled, and begged to join any party, even if not the BJP, just so that they can back the regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah is a troubling sign of our times. The same smash-and-grab model, which was used to split the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) some years ago, is again being deployed.

Who else could be fair game? The largest contingent of opposition MPs are in the Congress, followed by the Samajwadi Party, and then the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) (the Trinamool used to be in the third position). The challenge in engineering a defection within the Congress lies in securing enough of its 99 MPs to satisfy whatever interpretation of the anti-defection law is ultimately applied and to survive scrutiny by a potentially partisan Lok Sabha Speaker. That does not appear feasible at the moment, but when the wrecking ball starts swinging, no one can predict what might happen.

It also cannot be forgotten that many former Congress members are in the BJP now, serving a cause they once claimed was ideologically inimical to them. So, although Congress MP Rahul Gandhi did recently describe his party as being a force of resistance, the party has been part of the establishment and has played its part in hollowing out the electoral system.

Money in politics

In the age of its own dominance, the Congress never agreed to political finance and electoral funding being subjected to scrutiny, disclosures, or norms of conflict of interest. That has been at the heart of the deep rot, as money has eaten away the innards of a system intended to serve the people. Every year we see data about the increasing wealth of MPs and MLAs. It is pretty shameful.

The key to Modi’s stranglehold on the system is that he always understood the importance of money in politics. As Gujarat Chief Minister, mostly serving through a period when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power at the Centre, he was the main source of finance for many BJP campaigns. He assiduously cultivated big corporates, and by the time it became clear, in 2013, that he would be the prime ministerial candidate for the BJP, more money came to his party for the 2014 campaign than to the Congress that was actually in power at the Centre.

Subsequent income tax statements of the two parties actually tell the tale of what has happened since. Since Modi understood that money (and not people) had become the oxygen of the political class, the Enforcement Directorate and income tax authorities were sent to visit any business house or big corporation that dared to fund the opposition. Simultaneously, the BJP became synonymous with a few big corporations—with the Adani Group in particular receiving extraordinary contracts and protection.

But let us return to the question of which other parties can be split, gobbled up, and absorbed into the BJP. After the Congress, the Samajwadi Party has the largest contingent of 37 MPs, who must be in the sights of the executors of this great poaching exercise. The party has been out of power in Uttar Pradesh since 2017. The party, led by Akhilesh Yadav, has traditionally given tickets to candidates drawn from political families who are rooted in their regions. It is a sort of patronage network that could arguably be more durable than that of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool, which gave tickets to actors and public personalities without political roots, who signed up entirely on the basis of Mamata’s strength and charisma.

Of course, individual MPs of the Samajwadi Party can be threatened, even if not bought out entirely. Again, a certain number is needed to create a split. There are other small regional parties, such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal (4 MPs), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (3 MPs), and Yuvajana Sramika Ryuthu Congress Party (4 MPs), who will also be in the line of sight of the BJP. The Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), too, is being targeted with this formula and also the possibility of a split.

The DMK with its 22 MPs in the Lok Sabha would, of course, be coveted, especially as the party has every reason to be outraged with the Congress for dumping it after the polls and hitching up with the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam. One imagines, however, that it would be suicidal for a party birthed in the Dravidian ideology to actually help the BJP destroy federalism. But what is being discussed is the BJP coming out with a delimitation formula that increases the seats of all States by 50 per cent, and does not use population as the measure—in order to get the DMK’s support or the party’s MPs to be absent during voting.

Of course, when there’s a demonic force at work, anything can happen. It is also possible that the BJP is just fattening all the lambs for the big kill—and is perhaps even toying with the idea of calling an early general election in order to get a simple majority on its own at a time when regional forces have taken a hit.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.

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