The Subcontinent belongs to its people, to all its people. The people are Sovereign. The Subcontinentals decide the Subcontinent’s Laws and Policies and their Representatives who should channel people’s will in formulating them and implementing them.
The Subcontinent’s destiny is bound to Democracy. There is no other system, which can survive and prosper in the Subcontinent. In India it is a tried and tested system. Only democracy can legitimize the rulers.
There would be those, who say they want to live by God’s Laws and not man-made laws. Theoretically one can live by God’s Laws, the problem is however that it becomes the responsibility of the clergy to mediate between God’s laws and their implementation in a temporal setting and they neither have the objectivity, nor the expertise to accomplish that. They also exhaust their resources in analyzing, interpreting and debating God’s Law, that all concern for those who will be subjected to the Law, is easily overlooked. Moreover it is nigh to impossible to find a single acceptable interpretation to God’s Law, that the matter grinds to a standstill. So it becomes impossible to make God as the sovereign of the state, as one ends up making the clergy the sovereign.
At the most, God can be a sovereign over one’s heart, and through the channel of a citizen’s religious conscience can determine the outcome of the political process of the state.
Neither can a Monarchy, a Military Dictatorship or a One-Party Dictatorship determine the course of India’s Destiny. Only the Subcontinentals can determine the destiny of the Subcontinent.
It must be ensured that from the representatives of the people, there is absolute transparency, except maybe in cases of national security, and absolute accountability, and at all times there needs to be a constant reevaluation if the present framework of curbs and checks suffice to produce clean governance. Not just as representatives of the people, but as politicians as well, their assets and their campaign funding need to be made transparent. There needs to be besides the legal and administrative framework of checks and balances, also an interest on the part of civil society to organize themselves in NGOs and to try to investigate the truth.
Another weakness of the election system in the Subcontinent is that it is based on the Westminster model, where the candidate first-past-the-post gets elected. This skews the representativeness of the candidate. A two-stage model would be much better suited. The first two winners of the first election cycle in a constituency, in case none wins over 50% of the votes, would have to test their mettle in a second election cycle shortly after the first one.
There is also a need to establish a culture of one-on-one debates among the two front runners, and they should debate with each other why the one is a better candidate than the other. Depending on the size of the constituency, the debate may be aired live or not.
The democratic credentials of the representatives have to be supplemented by the democratic credentials of the political parties themselves. The right to stand as a candidate in a constituency should also be determined through an inner-party election for the candidature. Also all functionaries of a political party need to be elected by the rank and file of the party.
The Pan-Subcontinentalist is wedded to democracy, and despite its flaws, the Pan-Subcontinentalist sees it as the only available credible model. The Pan-Subcontinentalist also wants to ensure that he gets the best candidates to stand up for election and the representativeness of the candidate once elected is maximum.
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