All democracies are messy and politicians, its most active practitioners, opportunistic. Human nature being the same everywhere, to what degree a democracy is flawed would depend essentially on the stage of its evolution.
Witness the presidential nomination burlesque where a populist billionaire threatens to destabilise the establishment of his party with his glib street talk. We in India are still playing catch up with the older democracies, and, in time, we have no doubt, as our people get educated and imbibe modern values we too would see less irresponsible and corrupt politicians.
For, a democratic system is as good or as bad as its people are responsible, aware and accountable to the basic tenets of their founding charter. This somewhat lengthy preface is only meant to underline the inherent shortcomings in democratic systems — the least imperfect of all the systems of governance, as Churchill had said — which opportunistic politicians seek to exploit for purely selfish ends.
For instance, in Brazil the controversial bid to impeach President Dilma Rousseff is a clear abuse of the constitutional provision by opportunistic politicians to frustrate the popular mandate. It is a gang-up of venal politicians against a popularly elected president. She has shown a remarkable lack of tact in dealing with her detractors but she is not being proceeded against for being personally corrupt. No, the key charge against Rousseff is that she indulged in ‘creative accounting’ to present a rosy picture of the economy ahead of the last parliamentary election.
Now, this is something which our finance ministers, particularly someone like P. Chidambaram, have done on a regular basis to impress the people. In the case of Brazil, the investigators did find that funds from the State-owned oil behemoth, Petrobras, were diverted to oil the election machinery of the ruling Workers’ Party. But this charge was not brought against the President.
Instead, the commonplace charge that her government deceived people by presenting a rosy picture of the economy on the eve of the last presidential poll in 2014 is sought to be used to oust her from power. The impeachment bid, which made considerable headway on Sunday when the lower house gave its nod, in a way reflects the growing divide in the Brazilian society. Economic slowdown following the sharp drop in commodities markets has hurt the Brazilian economy hard.
The Government lacks funds to implement various welfare schemes which former President Lula da Silva, Dilma’s predecessor, had launched and which had made him immensely popular. However, the lack of funds following the global slowdown and the drop in commodities prices has made Dilma unpopular with a lot of people, especially when her chief electoral plank was to revive the economy. Coupled with reports of corruption in the ruling party, the economic hardship of the people has spurred the opposition to try and grab power through the impeachment of the president.
The Brazilian parliamentary system being a mix of direct and indirect elections through the proportional representation, there is often confrontation with the popularly elected president and indirectly elected Congressmen. Rousseff’s failure to build consensus and keep the Congress in good humour, something Lula was very good at, has also contributed to the present crisis. But ironically, should the impeachment succeed and she be forced to step down, her successor would be someone who stands personally tarred with the brush of wrong-doing and corruption.
So is the Speaker of the Lower House of the Congress who is spearheading the impeachment move. A socially and politically divided Brazil in the midst of an economic crunch could do without grave political uncertainty. This can only make economic recovery that much more difficult. Brazil is in for tough times ahead. But then politicians will be politicians everywhere — not just in India.
