The machinery of freedom is in the modern age reared on elections. In the simplest terms, what happens in an election is that the people choose by means of voting certain persons to deputise for them in the legislature, and through the legislature, in the Government. Many candidates come, but only some are chosen. The availability of the many is a condition that makes for wide choice. It conduces to quality in the representatives eventually elected. It follows that any restriction imposed on the availability of candidates amounts to tampering with the freedom and integrity of the elections.
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Organised political parties do just this sort of tampering. Candidates for election are by them subjected to a sort of filtering. The intention is that, instead of all and sundry going to the polls creating confusion in voter's minds, the less competent should be excluded and the best available put forward with the imprimatur of the party concerned. If, in this exclusion, the better get worsted in order that their inferiors might have a chance, it is the people that get cheated by having to content themselves with representatives of defective calibre when they could have had more worthy ones.
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The most ideal election that ever took place in India was probably the one in which Bhagawandas contested a seat for the Central Assembly from a U.P. constituency. He refused to canvass. He said the beneficiaries in an election should be the people and not the candidates. It was for the people to make a free choice of whomsoever they preferred without being subjected to coercive personal pressure of any kind. So he just publicised the things he stood for and left it there. Bhagawandas was elected with a thumping majority.
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The indignation that is sometimes hurled against candidates of other parties for having dared to come in at all for election, by leaders of powerful and influential parties like the Congress and the Muslim League, is scarcely in accord with a right and proper conception of electoral freedom. Contesting an election is a right of citizenship. Going to the people for authority is just what it means. How can any one party insist that only its nominees and none others should exercise this right and, go to the people, confounding competition with hostility? Critics that indulge in election propaganda classing Communists as anti-Congress miss the central secret of life's ordination, which lies in the surge of emulation, of dissent for the sake of advancing quicker, from the very heart of every kind of cooperative effort. If it is just the Congress only that is properly entitled to send deputies to the legislature, and resentment is to be poured on other parties aspiring for a like privilege, then the Congress should plainly stand out for the outright abolition of the whole modern machinery of election as entailing an unwarranted interference with a sacred prerogative of its own.
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Congress leaders hereabouts can certainly not be complimented on their manner of choosing candidates. The system of insisting on applications is alright if the elections are to be narrowed down into exclusively a candidates' business. Just as, for example, it is the applicant's business to take their own measures to get appointed to an advertised job. But if it is the interest of the people that is to be deemed as being really at stake, then the obvious correct procedure is to go out in quest of merit, application or no application. The extraction of a hundred rupee free with each application (on no account to be refunded, as very firmly proclaimed by the Congress office bearers) is worthy not of the Congress, but of a Shylock of the fiercest passion for mulcting others' money and property in exchange for nothing in particular. Let alone this poor country, anywhere in the world, according to any standard of computation of wages for services rendered, the hundred rupee fee levied on would-be Congress candidates represents a record in exaction before which well-known abuses in the Congress repertory of agitation pale into insignificance.
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Nor is it necessary for all the members of the parliamentary boards to go about peregrinating from district to district in a body to pick and choose candidates. Is it to foot the bill of these tours that the hundred rupee application fees were collected, in not a few cases from extremely poor contributors driven to debt or parasiticism by the levy? If Congress leadership has not succeeded in some two decades and more of political experience in arriving at intelligent judgments o n the persons available for parliamentary work in the various localities, what chance have they of any better result now in the heat and confusion of the jealous pleadings of rival claimants in a hectic tour conducted in a hurry?
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It was a very sensible suggestion that Sri Konda Venkatappiah made that intending candidates should gracefully stand out of the parliamentary board. But the clingers only clung to their seats the more tenaciously. Everywhere I find grave discontent with the doings of these dispensers of Congress tickets. There is scarcely any pretence now-a-days of assessment of worth in relation to the work to be done, nor of any concern over such things as programmes and policy to be adopted by way of parliamentary activity. The selection boards are infested with anxious anglers for ministerships. Would this one support me? Is the other one 'safe'? Is he not 'dangerous'? Unreliable? Can he be trusted to be 'grateful' and 'loyal' at the supreme moment?-- these according to all accounts, are the prime considerations that have found secure lodgement in the brains and consciences of most provincial custodians of Congress election affairs.
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Degenerates from inside the Congress, guilefully seeking to cover their traces with wild talk and pseudo-revolutionary tirades against alleged enemies of the country in other political camps, such as the Communists, are now the worst of the saboteurs of Congress influence, and their follies are fast eating into the piled up credit of the Congress gathered through years of stress at great cost to many martyrs. Violent, disastrous and far-flung have been the effects of the vulgar amalgam of Gandhism and anti-Communism fashioned with specious logic by certain high ranking luminaries of the Congress hierarchy. The burning of the People's Age Press in Bombay is a measure of the mischief of their preachings. Journalism being a sort of religion in addition to being a profession, the hearts of journalists everywhere will bleed for the mishap that has befallen, at the hands of hooligans, one of the most ably conducted journals in the whole country. News of this vandalistic exploit somehow recalled to my mind two remarkable passages:
One is from Bernard Shaw: "A scoundrel is a person who pursues his or her own personal gratification without regard to the feelings and interests of others."
The other is from Massingham: "He who sows seed in the minds of men must have the eye of a hawk to see where it falls, and the vision of a god to discern whether its fruit be good or evil."--- (February 16, 1946) S A K A
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