It is former prime minister Indira Gandhi’s 25th death anniversary on October 31. 

What was her legacy?

She was associated with events like the Emergency, which briefly made Gerald Ford head of the largest democracy in the world, and decades of militancy in Punjab.

Her policy of nationalising banks was mentioned as a reason why the Indian banking sector weathered the global financial crisis.

She also won a famous military victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan and ordered the Pokhran I nuclear tests three years later.

Going by columns and television discussions around her anniversary, it is safe to say it was contentious.

Over her career and beyond she was compared to a dumb doll, the goddess ‘Durga’, a lioness and Napolean.

Some called her, like Margaret Thatcher, the only man in her cabinet.

Richard Nixon described her as an “old witch”.

She herself played at being Joan of Arc as a child.

The more enthusiastic of her partymen coined the phrase “India is Indira and Indira is India”.

Its cadence has had a longer shelf life, if not the idea itself.

Twenty five years after her assassination, the Congress party in the ascendant, one news channel recounted her as India’s Indira.

Would it be accepted the other way around now?

Indira’s India is not an incredible idea given she was the second longest serving prime minister we had.

She was Prime Minister or minister for eighteen of her sixty six years. Not counting her other political roles.

I was four when she died and my memory of her is from Doordarshan films showing her unfurling the tricolour.

Much clearer is the memory as a seven-year-old, of waiting for hours behind wood barrricades with my mother to watch Rajiv Gandhi pass by.

What I remember is my mother’s patience and my disappointment when I couldn’t glimpse him as his convoy zipped by.

My mother did however, or so she said.

It was a Gandhi who was passing through that day and that seemed to be enough reason to wait however long, for a fleeting moment.

Was dynasty and its mystique, which she was accused of building, the most lasting contribution of Indira Gandhi?

Or is it too soon to assess her legacy?

With 8071 candidates contesting 543 seats – that’s an average of 15 candidates for each seat — the 400 million Indian voters who chose to vote sure looked spoilt for choice.

But were they?

Though democracy means choosing who our rulers are going to be, many say there is a crucial missing link in Indian democracy — the lack of inner-party democracy.

This results in the lack of people’s participation especially in choosing candidates, unlike the U.S. where primaries are held by political parties to elect candidates.

Rahul Gandhi says he is trying to make reforms.

At a recent press conference, commenting on his position within the ruling Congress party he said, “It is undemocratic and it is a reality.”

“The Indian political system tends to be related to who you know, who your brother is, who your sister is, and it’s in every single party, in the BJP it exists, in the Congress it exists, that’s a fact of life, that’s the reflection of a closed system.”

Policies are rarely formed after debates involving the party cadres and tested through their votes.

Guessing and second guessing why people booted out a candidate or rooted for another remains the default option for making sense of electoral verdicts.

Political scientist Ashutosh Varshney writes that the lack of internal party democracy leads to a fractured polity, as no leader of a new group can hope to capture an existing party in an open contest.

The weekly ‘Tehelka’ reported 10 billion dollars being secretly spent by politicians to woo voters.

In the absence of a culture of volunteerism, which cannot take off until people are involved in electoral campaigns as in the United States, some say the importance of money bags and black money can only go up.

Critics say all of these tendencies — fractured polity, unstable coalitions, promiscuous alliance hopping, muddy electoral verdict, horse trading of legislators — will most probably be on show in the next few days as the process of government formation gathers steam.

Voters generally get to choose from a field of candidates who are selected by the party bosses.

Pending this crucial democratic reform, did the election process represent a real choice by the voters? Or was it an expensive illusion?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not contesting elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower and popular house of parliament.

This is for reasons of health and also because the constitution permits the prime minister to be a member of either of the two houses of parliament.

Like Singh, we have had prime ministers from the Rajya Sabha earlier but they sought to get elected to the lower house and succeeded easily.

As the de facto head of the government, the prime minister is expected to earn people’s approval directly.

Mayawati recently took a dig at Singh over the issue.

“This Manmohan Singh has not contested any public election…he was brought back door in Rajya Sabha and made prime minister,” the Bahujan Samaj Party chief said at an election rally.

“If Manmohan can become PM, why can’t an educated Dalit woman.”

This is possibly the first instance in Indian politics where the sitting prime minister has decided to stay away from the race.

But should India’s prime minister be a member of the Lok Sabha?

The opposition, after initially trying to make it a poll issue, now seems to have lost the plot.

The question keeps popping up on internet discussion boards.

FOR

– Those who support the idea of a prime minister from the lower house say that a popular vote marks acceptability by the people as compared to someone nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

– Such a person having earned the people’s mandate is seen as less susceptible to manipulation.

– A person’s performance as an MP is seen as a necessary test of his competence and claim to the top job.

– Some even suggest that a prime ministerial candidate should seek election with a pre-announced team, something like the shadow cabinet system in Britain.

AGAINST

– The most convincing argument against the idea is that the constitution puts no such caveat.

– The upper house is seen as a talent pool where competent candidates are sent after consideration. This compensates for impulsive behavior of voters which can sometimes make “good” candidates unelectable. For example, Manmohan Singh lost the 1999 Lok Sabha election from the posh South Delhi constituency.

– It is also felt that any prime minister would work according to the party’s ideology, membership of a house being irrelevant to his policies and performance.

– Moreover, the prime minister is in any case indirectly elected (by the party MPs), so the argument of his having greater acceptance may not cut much ice.

– Some feel that if the person is a representative of the majority party and competent then nothing else should count. Others say the proposal calls into question the very rationale of having an upper house, and therefore, needs to be fleshed out.

One comment on the online forum points to the question being a moral rather than a legal one.

There are two facts to bear in mind.

In the Westminster system of democracy, a prime minister from the upper house would be an anachronism.

Secondly, the constitution review commission recognised the lower house’s pre-eminence in its recommendation that the prime minister be directly elected by the house in the event of a hung poll verdict.

As for the practical aspect, the Congress is contesting around 400 seats in these elections, and finding a safe seat for a politician like Manmohan Singh, the sitting prime minister, should have been easy.

In March, opposition leader L.K. Advani raised the issue at an election rally.

“Singh will be more acceptable to the people of India if he decides to fight the elections and go to the Lok Sabha,” he said.

Did Advani have a valid point?

The Congress party has bought the rights to “Jai Ho”, the Oscar-winning song from “Slumdog Millionaire”, to use for its election campaign.

Although popular Bollywood song tunes have always been used after being set to new lyrics for canvassing votes, acquiring the rights to a song for election campaigning is a possible first.

Congress leaders said the song, whose title is Hindi for “Let There be Victory,” will be played during rallies in rural towns, villages and cities. But why did the party go so far as to get the song rights?

Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi cited the Oscar wins as a result of good governance and inclusive democracy under UPA rule.

Popular culture in India has politics, movies, cricket and religion as predominant ingredients and elections are a mix of all these.

The list of movie stars who have contested and won elections is a long one.

Occasionally a politician also forays into acting — like communist party leader Brinda Karat in the film “Amu”.

Sports and politics also mix well. Cricketers like Vinod Kambli and footballer I.M.Vijayan have acted in films. Former India player Kirti Azad has contested elections while former cricket captain Mohammed Azharuddin recently joined the Congress.

But the link between movies and politics is even stronger.

A simple Google search throws up various theories that try to explain why popularity on the screen transforms into votes in India.

Identifying oneself as a fan of a movie star in India is seen as assertion of one’s identity, which may be regional, linguistic or along caste lines.

Thus Indian fans are said to relate to their favourite stars at a very personal level.

The popularity of religious belief in ‘darshan’ or ‘seeing’ the deity and be ‘seen’ by her is said to have parallels with watching cinema and the way movie stars are perceived by people.

The tradition of worshipping people, as in saints and teachers, is also linked to this. Indian movie stars have been worshipped in temples in some cases.

The sheer number of films produced in India and the fact that they are affordable also ensures that the stars have wide recognition.

But though cinema is popular all over India, it is only in southern India that movie stars have had the most success as popular politicians. Movies and politics have the strongest links there.

There is no clear explanation as to why?

The “Jai Ho” song is in Hindi, a language the southern Indian electorate has an uneasy relationship with.

But will that limit its electoral appeal?

Rahul Gandhi spoke at a news conference in Amritsar last month. Somewhat predictably newspapers and TV channels covering the event focused on his comments on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and his defense against being called a rookie by a seasoned political rival.

They ignored the context of his visit — to review preparations for the local youth Congress elections, being conducted with greater involvement of party workers at the grass-roots level. It’s a practice he apparently wants to replicate across other states.

If Gandhi is serious about it and succeeds in doing so, it will further the cause of internal party democracy, which is a major blind spot in the working of our democracy.

The expression ‘political party’ did not even enter the Indian Constitution for the first thirty-five years of its life and even afterwards it did so cursorily in a Schedule.

The Constitution ensures that we elect our representatives but does not specify how political parties should choose the candidates — it’s a decision that does not involve citizens.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, even more than the final outcome, was the manner in which candidates are chosen.

Constant and intense interaction between the potential candidates and the party members brings out with a degree of clarity the political agenda of the candidates who in turn get a chance to tweak them to the expectations of voters.

This brings more transparency in the political domain. If a candidate loses or wins in those conditions then one knows the reasons for it.

If there were more internal democracy India’s pre-election opinion polls would probably be more accurate.

The result of the state elections as well as the general elections in 2009 would also make more sense.

Ashutosh Varshney, writing in the Times of India, mentions the lack of intra-party democracy as a major reason why India may not produce a Barack Obama.

He argues that lack of internal elections means that “rank outsiders like Mayawati, tend to create new political parties, but it is well known that it is much harder to create a new nationwide political organization than use an existing one.”

This reduces the probability of a candidate like Obama coming to power in India.

I find it a bit ironical that Varshney writes about the importance of internal party democracy in the same issue of the paper that also covers Rahul Gandhi’s Amritsar news conference but overlooks his initiative towards firming up the election process.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in Outlook magazine that “most political parties do not institutionalise internal party reform because it could jeopardise the hold of current party incumbents.”

Given that, I think such a step by any politician needs to be appreciated for its boldness. It also needs to be followed up and scrutinised.

If the media focuses more on this lacuna of Indian democracy perhaps it will help put the issue on the common agenda and make the elections more meaningful.

After all there is something called the ‘observer effect’ which causes a change by the very act of looking at something. 

The question is how soon will the media start focusing on the selection process that precedes the elections.

As a financial journalist, covering politics and parliamentary debate is sometimes part of my job. What I witnessed on Tuesday in parliament — wads of cash being flashed around inside the lowerhouse– is something I had never bargained for.

The civil-nuclear deal with the United States will go through, and some reforms may be pushed by the government with the help of
its new allies. But politics will never be the same again, tainted by allegations of bribery and a vulgur display of money power.

Shortly after his government won a convincing victory in parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the victory sent a message to the world that “India’s head and heart was sound and India is prepared to take its rightful place in the comity of nations.”

India has attracted global attention due to its strong economic growth and aspires to be a global power. But now more than ever, it needs to fix its politics and governance so that these two key elements do not derail its ambitions.

All political parties will need to seriously think about the events of the past few days and work out mechanisms to prevent it from happening again.

Global best practices need to be imbibed to help politics and governance catch up with the demands of a globalising economy. If it does not happen soon, then ordinary Indians’ cynicism and disillusionment with their politicians will become irrecoverable.

Too much is at stake.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the civilian nuclear deal with the United States is all about whether India holds early elections or not.

Every newspaper is speculating if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has staked his personal reputation on the deal, will resign to disassociate himself from an administration that failed to save a pact keenly watched by the world.

But are these the arguments India should be debating in the short-term or should we be discussing the real benefits and drawbacks of the deal?

The communists oppose the deal, in large part because they see it as a front for Washington’s strategic bulwark against a rising China and increasingly unstable Pakistan.

Besides, they say there are many holes in the deal that Washington will use to manipulate India’s foreign and strategic programmes, and that nuclear energy is not a solution to the shortage of electricity in the country or rising oil prices.

Why? Because nuclear energy can not meet India’s huge oil consumption in the transport sector, is expensive to produce and will expose India to manipulations by a small international cartel of uranium suppliers.

But most Indians feel, if straw polls by newspaper and television channels are to be believed the nuclear deal is good for India: The agreement is meant to provide India with the means to produce clean energy — a key constraint to economic growth. And the rise in crude prices underlines need for diversified sources of energy (even if nuclear will take ages to fill the gap).

Internationally, the accord represents a long overdue acceptance of India as a responsible nuclear power.

From the pro-deal camp here are a few points to ponder:

* Even if relations sour with the United States, India can turn to France, Russia, Australia or other uranium producers for supplies, courtesy the waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group which is independent of the deal with Washington?

* Why should India not use the deal to get a waiver from NSG and the opportunity to clear its name as a nuclear pariah state?

If the deal falls through, it is unlikely Washington — or any other nuclear nation — will broach the idea of selling nuclear fuel to India anytime soon.

But will that outcome make India more dependent on outside sources for energy, and weaken its own economic prospects against the growing clout of China?

This is the kind of debate that India would benefit from. Focusing on elections may only reap short term political benefits.

In the end, it was hard not to feel a little bit sorry for Nepal’s deposed King Gyanendra.

He had seemed an impossibly distant, arrogant figure in the past, but on Wednesday, addressing the press before leaving the palace, in his first and possibly final news conference, he kept his dignity and showed a previously unseen human side.

So it was a pity his swansong — and that of a once-cherished 239-year-old monarchy — was surrounded by chaos, with more than 200 journalists jostling for a view in the palace’s small main hall, constantly pushing and shoving each other.

As Gyanendra read from a prepared text in the palace’s small main hall, two stuffed tigers behind him, people shouted aggressive questions as the former king ploughed on, his amplified voice alternately booming and then dropping out altogether.

He may have spent most of his time in his gaudy pink Kathmandu palace cut off from reality, ultimately unloved and unlistened to, and some may have felt his final farewell was a fitting end.

But for a monarchy traditionally revered as incarnations of Hindu gods, here was a king almost pouring his heart out and the media hardly seemed to be listening.

Gyanendra took over as king in 2001 after the death of his more popular brother and many of his family in a royal massacre, which he said was a time of “overwhelming grief”, and was ousted after a specially elected assembly voted to abolish the monarchy.

In the years between, he alienated most of his subjects by seizing absolute power and doing little good with it. Most Nepalis are glad to see the back of him.

Being jostled at that rugby scrum of a news conference, I wondered how Gyanendra could ever have hoped to be a success when he grabbed the reins of the state.

In the end, royal rule failed to rescue Nepal from civil war and economic decline, leading instead to street protests and ultimately his ouster two weeks ago.

Gyanendra, 60, said he accepted the decision to abolish the monarchy. He did not quite apologize for his mistakes, but he did express sorrow for any suffering he said he may inadvertently have caused.

He spoke movingly of the massacre, when King Birendra and eight other members of the royal family were shot dead in the same pagoda-roofed palace by Crown Prince Dipendra, who then turned the gun on himself.

He said dignity of office prevented him from shedding tears but that accusations he might have been complicit in the murder were “very painful to us and are still so”.

A NEW NEPAL?

In the new corridors of power, former Maoist rebels, who fought a decade-long war to abolish the monarchy but are now on the verge of forming a government, talk of a “New Nepal”.

But the sight of yawning, lackadaisical immigration staff, broken airport trolleys and chaotic roads on arrival in Kathmandu show the old Nepal is going to take some shifting.

This is one of the world’s poorest countries, where politicians have a reputation for squabbling and stealing, and bureaucrats are widely seen as lazy and lacking initiative.

Millions of Nepali people live in abject poverty but the deposed king is widely believed to have a fortune invested in tea, tobacco and casinos.

He will not want for much in his new life as a commoner. But his family is being forced to leave its home in disgrace and will stay, for the time being, in a modest tin-roofed hunting lodge on the outskirts of the capital.

His stepmother and his step-grandmother, in their 80s and 90s respectively, have refused to leave and have been allowed to stay on, in small houses in the palace grounds.

In the old days, Gyanendra had more than 700 staff and retainers, but these days the palace apparently cannot find anyone to mow the lawn. Those who are left seem to have lost their spirit.

“Many are weeping and have not eaten meals for a long time, because they are sorry,” said Madhav Bhattarai, the former king’s chief religious adviser. “It is natural, some of them have worked there for 40 or 50 years.”

Most Nepali people now believe the country is better off without its monarchy and a few jeered at Gyanendra as he swept out of the palace in a black Mercedes for the last time on Wednesday night.

But without such a convenient scapegoat as the king, politicians could face more pressure to achieve something. In a country as difficult to govern as this, that may take some doing.

Reuters Insight: A monarch’s exit — a video of Simon’s analysis.

Another Himalayan kingdom is falling, a chapter closing on an ancient historical tradition. But will the modern system of democracy do a better job?

Sikkim’s monarchs, the Chogyals, retreated into history when India annexed their territory in 1975. Tibet’s “priest-king”, the Dalai Lama, was forced in exile when China invaded his land in the 1950s.

Now, after 239 years of the Shah dynasty, Nepal is set to become a secular republic on Wednesday .

In the Himalayas, only in Bhutan does a monarchy still play a significant role, and even there it voluntarily surrendered power this year to a new democratically elected parliament.

Many of these kings were once revered as incarnations of Buddha or Vishnu, some still are.

But the Himalayan monarchies have come under pressure from he north and south, from their giant neighbours China and India. Pressure has come from below as well, from subjects demanding democracy on the roof the world. One by one, they are succumbing to that pressure.

The Buddhist majority in Bhutan seemed sad to see their king stand aside and democracy enter their largely peaceful land, fearing that conflict and corruption would surely follow.

But few Nepalis seem unhappy to see Gyanendra or his son Paras pushed aside, even if many liked the idea of a constitutional monarchy.

Some people wonder if will Nepal one day regret the passing of its monarchy. Or are its people right to celebrate the advent of secular democracy and an end to feudalism?

In 1990, street protests forced King Birendra to relinquish power and introduce democracy. The palace was openly reviled at the time, but over the ensuing decade it gradually rebuilt its reputation. While politicians squabbled and stole, the king stayed firmly above the fray.

The palace massacre, and Gyanendra’s seizure of power, changed all that, and left the monarchy fatally wounded.

It now looks likely as though Maoist chief Prachanda will be prime minister, leaving the post of president a largely symbolic one.

But who will Nepal find to be its new, unifying figurehead? Does anyone mourn the death of an ancient tradition? And will its politicians finally live up to the promises they have made?