Why donâ€™t good people get into politics?

Shantanu Bhagwat
08 December 2012, 06:37 PM IST

As must be obvious to many of you by now, getting people actively involved & thinking about politics is something very close to my heart. So last fortnight when a young professional asked me, "Why don't "good people" get into politics?" I thought this was worth a post. To avoid a side-argument on who are "good people", let me hastily clarify that "good people" is just a broad, handy label that includes accomplished, professionally successful women & men of integrity willing to commit a significant part of their life to public service.

Back to the question. A week earlier, I ran a poll on my blog which threw up some interesting data on this question. Almost half the respondents cited 2 main factors: "Family Responsibilities" and "Loss of Income". Family responsibilities are of course personal (and vary widely) so I cannot really comment but I guess they are at least partly linked to the second reason cited: "Loss of Income".

In the world of venture capital & start-ups, we have a popular phrase: "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!". It has more than a grain of truth in it. And that is probably a major reason why otherwise very successful, talented and sincere individuals do not even consider politics as a career option. It simply does not pay.

Not that such individuals are looking for fat pay-packets. But they expect to be able to maintain a certain standard of living & fulfill their family responsibilities. The salary that MPs and MLAs get leaves no room for that.

Today, India's finest women & men shun politics like a plague. The present set-up has no attraction for the genuinely public-minded individuals. Many such individuals branch off into social causes or charities instead. That has to change. A good beginning in this direction would be to have a significantly better rewards and incentives structure in place. But better rewards and incentives are only part of the story.

We then need to work on the far bigger challenge of dismantling "barriers to entry". The first of these is the enormous amount of money that is now required to contest almost any MLA or MP election.

The second are the "built-in" incentives in the system for corruption and unethical behaviour that make accomplished individuals simply uninterested in representing us as political leaders.

The "incentive" is the extraordinary control politicians enjoy over large part of public finances and public assets. The "compulsion" for unethical behaviour comes in the form of huge huge amount of money needed to contest any decent-sized election. Of course, there are limits on electoral expenses. These are routinely violated & expenses are under-reported as a matter of course . A particularly egregious example is the "expenditure" incurred by ex Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan on Salman Khan's meetings in his constituency.

Since the limits are so low (& fly in the face of reality), the only way anyone realistically stands a chance of winning is by lying about the amount of money they spent on the campaign. As fellow activist Nixon Fernando mentioned, "We have effectively set up a gate post in politics (which says) 'you have to be dishonest to enter'."

In the words of my friend, Sanjeev Sabhlok, "the qualifications for being given a 'ticket' to contest elections are: possession of a modest intellect, capped with serious moral defects, the ability to play fast and loose with public money, close association with genuine, mafia-type criminals and ability to threaten honest candidates to prevent them from contesting elections".

What is the solution? Clearly electoral reforms have to be top priority. Such reforms would necessarily include some element of state funding of elections.

Electoral spending & campaign finance are at the heart of large-scale corruption in India – something that a lot of people appear to be unable or unwilling to recognise & accept. So we need better accounting, tighter auditing and removal of archaic spending limits.

State funding of elections is a critical part of these "solutions". Next would be a very significant increase in wages of MPs and MLAs while getting rid of all of the "perks". Third would include having some kind of accountability. How? By helping people become politically aware and asking them to monitor the performance of their MPs, MLA and Corporators.

In parallel, let us work on creating a "demand" for "good people" to get into politics. Let us help our friends understand the damage that political apathy inflicts on a society and a nation. Unless at least a few of these things happen, there is little chance of "good people" getting into politics, much less win.

Why does all this matter? It matters because at the core of rot today is the utter failure of our political leadership. A leadership that has today reduced to a group of largely incompetent men & women, with dubious morals, with little stake in development and poor understanding of the challenges we face. This must change. As the redoubtable (late) C K Prahalad pointed out, India's crisis today is a "crisis of leadership"

...India has more people waiting to be led than any other place on earth. It is time to act and act decisively.

Join us in asking, demanding these reforms & changes. Talk to your friends, neighbours & family members about this. And next time someone visits you to ask for your vote, ask them for their views on these steps. This is how change will come, slowly but surely. Jai Hind, Jai Bharat!