When politicians change sides: Welcome to India, land of political acrobatics

Some newspapers have named this pre-election period the “dance of democracy”. But skim the headlines and you’ll wonder whether we’re witnessing the “farce of democracy” instead.

Every day at dizzying speed, some politician associated with a party for many years – known well by their constituents as a member of that party which has a particular profile – suddenly switches sides, that too just before the election.

Changing parties is an Indian political game for which we could probably claim copyright. But the speed and pace at which it is being played out in this election season surpasses anything we have seen in the past.

As a result, election-related news reports – and here I am referring to the mainstream print media – would be of passing interest to the average reader who is not steeped in the minutiae of the political merry-go-round. What many readers may well ask is whether the party system, or even elections, have any meaning if this special type of political acrobatics takes place just before we go out and vote. 

Today, there is no way to ensure that the person we vote for continues to represent the ideology of a party they belonged to when they contested, even if some people do vote for an individual irrespective of the party to which they belong. But if the cynicism that underlines the party-switching game gets across to voters, one wonders if more people will hold back and choose not to vote at all. 

As a young man who seemed interested in politics, especially of his home state of Bihar, told me recently, “Even though I was eligible to vote when I turned 18, I have never voted. And I’m not sure I will this time either.”

We know now, of course, why the big political players switched sides. In an excellent piece of reporting, Deeptiman Tiwary of Indian Express put together information that gives us a graphic view of not just who changed parties, but why. For instance, cases against two top NCP leaders – Ajit Pawar, currently deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, and Praful Patel, former aviation minister – were closed shortly after they joined the BJP. Tiwary documents that of the 25 opposition leaders who joined the BJP since 2014, 23 have had cases against them dropped or put in cold storage. The pattern for lesser-known politicians who have had a sudden change of heart and sought space in the BJP is likely to be the same. 

While this current political circus has established that the BJP is not “the party with a difference” as it once wanted people to believe, welcoming as it is of politicians with serious corruption charges against them, this also speaks to the quality of people entering the political arena. The decline has been evident for some time but now it has crossed new summits.

Which brings us back to the meaning of an electoral democracy with a party system.

The rest of the world is watching this election as well, given the sheer numbers involved, with almost a billion people voting in an election spread over 44 days. There is no other election of this size anywhere in the world. But already questions about the elections and Indian democracy are being raised.

The Financial Times, a well-respected international business newspaper, wrote a critical editorial last week headlined “The mother of democracy is not in good shape”. The paper’s particular concern was the way law enforcement agencies have been used against opposition leaders culminating in the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. It quotes Rahul Gandhi’s accusation that the BJP was resorting to “match fixing” in this election and says it is puzzled that the governing party should even feel the need to “squeeze the opposition”.

Of course, critical comments such as this in the Western media are most often dismissed by the BJP, which accuses these media groups of having an agenda. Yet, despite this public stance, it is not able to ignore such criticism entirely. We cannot forget that it was the Modi government that banned a BBC documentary in January 2023 even though it was not going to be televised in this country. 

But apart from these passing pinpricks from foreign shores, there is little that the party need worry about with the Indian media. We will have to wait and watch the quality and the slants in the election coverage, but it would be fair to guess that there would be precious little that’s critical of Narendra Modi or the BJP in mainstream media.

Since the 2019 election, the changed reality as far as the media is concerned is the noticeable growth of small, independent media houses that have used social media effectively to put across a different narrative. We saw this most vividly, as I mentioned in my last column, in the coverage of the electoral bond scam. It was Project Electoral Bond, a joint effort by The News Minute, Newslaundry, Scroll and independent journalists, as well as the investigative work of the Reporters’ Collective since 2019 that finally told us the real story of who paid which party and what they got in return. R Rajagopal of The Telegraph has rightly acknowledged their work in his article “Keyboard guerrillas”. Those stories are still tumbling out (read here).

Also, YouTube hosts numerous news-based programmes by former mainstream TV journalists, apart from Ravish Kumar, in Indian languages that are watched by millions. In cities, your local vegetable vendor, carpenter, plumber, painter, or taxi or auto driver does not have the time to sit in front of a television and watch the news. All of them catch it on the run, usually on their phones. And the channels they watch are not just the mainstream channels that can also be found on YouTube but these independent channels that have a greater connect. 

On the other side is the BJP’s IT cell that’s excelled in using all forms of social media. It is already on overdrive. And assisting it are dozens of YouTube channels, also apparently independent, that daily spread not just disinformation, but also direct propaganda that will help the BJP. Kunal Purohit writes in this piece in Al Jazeera that media studies have established that Indians “place greater trust in news they view on YouTube and WhatsApp, over the news delivered by mainstream media outlets”. The days when we asked someone where they got their information, and the reply would be, “Akhbar mein padha” (read it in the newspaper), are well and truly in the past.

We will have to wait and watch which form of media succeeds in changing people’s minds, or confirming their biases, and whether any of this will have an impact on voter choice.

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