GV Ramakrishna with Dr.R.H.Patil and R.Balakrishnan

G V Ramakrishna (former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the Disinvestment Commission and former Member of the Planning Commission) expressed concern at the instability caused by fragmentation in the ruling coalition that gives enormous to small and insignificant regional parties to call the shots when it comes to policy making. This, he said, is stifling policy making and leading to mis-governance of the Indian State making it vulnerable to terror attacks and security breach. Mr.Ramakrishna, was speaking at the launch of Pathbreakers 2, a collection of 25 interviews with a set of role models and as usual, he also had solution to the problems that he highlighted.

He said: Election after election, we are getting more and more parties into parliament. Today, anybody with three members is a political party. With five members, he can get a national election symbol allotted to him and run for parliament. In parliament there is a fragmentation of parties and they look for support from other parties to get the requisite numbers. As a result, in the last three elections, we have not seen any party get a simple majority in parliament. People like to call it the coalition dharma, but whether it dharma or adharma is for people to see.

When you say that we want the welfare of people and the dharma of coalition, the situation that arises is that the smaller the parties, the minimum critical mass that you have is the monkey on the scales. If you have two parties on both sides of the scale, mathematically you can say that the weight of the monkey on the scales will be larger than the difference between the two parties on the scale. With so many parties in parliament, we now have competition to be the monkey on the scale, with the result that the smallest party determines the role and policy of government by threatening to withdraw support and bring down the government. So managing coalitions has become a task which is often performed at the cost of the welfare of the people and development of society.

Who is responsible for this? I have been saying for a long time to various election commissions that according to the Supreme Court of India, they have the authority to deny a common election symbols to parties that are not genuinely national parties. And a national party has been defined in the Representation of People Act. The act says that you must have a minimum 5% of the vote in another state, other than its own. If you apply this definition, many of the parties who influence policies at the centre do not even qualify as national parties even according to the law and the Commission has not taken steps to correct this position. It will not be corrected by parliament, because everyone has a vested interest not to change things. The election commission has the power to deny regional parties the right to a common election symbol and claiming to be a national party. If you apply this rule, then only four or five parties in India qualify to be called national parties. If you confine the elections to these five parties at the national level – the house of the people – then you will have a stable government at the centre.

It is not as if the smaller parties will not be represented in parliament. In fact, the constitution makers – Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in his speech had said, ‘it is not as though people at the State level do not have representation – the council of the States, which is the Rajya Sabha will have vast powers in controlling legislation and policy, but not at the council of the people. Bringing about this change is an important aspect of state governance. Otherwise, we will see more and more fragmented parties, more horse trading and more monkeys on the scale”.

Anther aspect of governance, said Mr.Ramakrishna,  is to keep politicians away from independent agencies. “The effort must be to see that the most dependent agency must become independent – that is the police. Today the police have become handmaidens of politicians.  So many commissions have recommended that the independence and impartiality of the police must be maintained and there must be no interference with the police. But we have seen that everyday the politicians use the police to come to power, to stay in power, to arrest people they do not like, to protect those they like. We see this reported in the papers everyday”.

He also said, we need to think about “how ordinary people like us influence policy. Can independent people enter politics and become something like the monkey on the scales and ensure good governance?”

“Is it easy for us to enter politics, become an influence in politics? We should think about it and we must realise that the expenditure for a by election was around Rs 70 crore for one seat. So to enter politics you need and we need one more thing — muscle power. This has become a necessary condition to enter the political fray. Whether we influence politics by electing the right person or not voting for any candidate or find a way to let the average person get into parliament in large numbers. If we can work out answers to this question, we would have substantially added to the debate we have had on governance”.

Mr.Ramakrishna, had began his address saying, “We are now at a moment in history where the nature of violence has changed. Instead of two armies facing each other in a battlefield, we see the tragedy of women and children being blown up in their own homes or in playgrounds in the new form of warfare, which is terrorism. The very nature of violence has changed People all over the world ask what is the future of the earth. If you speak to environmentalists, they paint a dire picture about what could happen if we don’t take urgent steps to protect the environment. It seems rather difficult at the moment. Now change can be brought about in different ways”. Mr.Ramakrishna then discussed change and governance as it applies to the individual, to companies and to the State. They are all interlinked, he said.

Here are his views:

“The first aspect of change is as it applies to oneself — the human being. What is his approach to life, what is his approach to society and what is his contribution to the world and to society. That is the first questions we should ask and find out what is self-governance. Recent events have shown that self-governance includes, governance of belief, governance of excessive ambition or total disregard for the rest of the members of society. Today we have the impoverishment of thousands of people to satisfy the greed of few. People have made billions of dollars at the cost of others. That money has not vanished entirely, some of it has, but the rest has gone into the hands of others because of the total disregard for the rules of governance. 

You cannot have a regulator looking over people’s shoulders all the time, there has to be self-governance. This has a lot to do with the other two aspects of governance that we speak of. One of these is corporate governance. This has been defined in so many ways and the many bubbles we have seen in housing sub-prime or the many financial deals of banks all this is a manifestation of this lack of corporate governance. You cannot have a regulator looking over everyone’s shoulder. Whether we have audit committees or independent directors, self-governance is the root to achieve what we want even in corporate governance.

In all these aspects of governance – self-governance, corporate governance or state governance – you have to look at the individual. Today you find, at the slightest sign of dissent people resort to violence. This can only be corrected by education at the younger level. Unless you inculcate the spirit of informed discussion, debate and dissent without resorting to violence, you cannot have a stable democracy. Dissent is allowed in democracy, but not violent dissent. We must train our young people to dissent in a non-violent manner and learn tolerance at a very young age. This was taught by the father of the nation who fought the mighty British in a non-violent manner and us freedom in this manner. Cultivating the right attitude to dissent at a very young age is also a part of self-governance and the right standards.

Unfortunately, the main object of everybody today is only on making more and more money. There is nothing wrong with money, it can be used for a good purposes or bad purposes and it can be earned in a good way and not make in the wrong way. If all these aspects are taken into account, then standards of governance can be laid down for the betterment of society. Otherwise, if you look at corporate governance, the company with the wrong name was getting all the awards.”