The municipal elections in Denmark concluded early this week. These are the only public Danish elections in which non-citizens can vote. If you are permanently settled in Denmark but have not taken a Danish passport, you can still vote in the municipal elections. It is a wise rule.
This means that I follow Danish municipal elections closely, because for once I can go out to vote. It is, unlike the scene in India, a kind of family outing in Denmark: families stroll to a school or another such institution in the neighbourhood being used as a polling station, stop to talk to acquaintances, and cast their votes. There are no aggressive party workers or policemen around.
Young faces
Of course, all the electricity poles and blank walls are festooned with posters of different candidates, as they would be in India. I cannot help comparing these posters with those I usually see during Denmark’s national elections (in which I cannot vote).
Now, all parties in Denmark, except the staunchly leftist Enhedslisten, use predictably charming photos of their candidates on the posters. (Enhedslisten, which is against personality politics, uses only party symbols and general illustrations.)
Before the elections, all these faces were there, smiling down at me from the posters, probably photoshopped. They belonged to all kinds of parties — from the far Right to centre of Left. I could not help looking at them when I walked, cycled, or drove to work. What I noticed most of all was the difference between those faces and the faces on the posters for the Danish national elections.
A far greater number of aspiring municipal politicians in Denmark seem much younger than nation-level politicians. Though the Mayor candidates tend to be around my age, most of the others seem to be in their twenties and thirties. I recall this difference also from a visit to France some years ago, which had coincided with the municipal elections there.
It seems that in places like Denmark and France there is a significant difference of age between aspirants for municipal positions and those who contest national or State-equivalent elections. This makes sense, if one sees politics as a process, an education and a test. It makes good sense for an aspiring young person to pass through municipal politics, and, if she distinguishes herself, to be moved on to State and national levels.
However, being Indian, I also cannot help noticing that this difference does not seem to obtain in my motherland. From what I have seen of municipal candidates in India, I cannot pinpoint a similar age difference, a difference that signifies a movement up the party political hierarchy, a gathering of experience and testing of capabilities. If anything, I feel that younger candidates, when they appear, tend to pop up right at the top level of State or national politics in India.
Having the right connections
This difference is significant. It indicates not just, as I have highlighted above, that politics is seen less as a job to be done well in India than it is in places like Denmark and France. Indian politics, it suggests, is not tied as much to experience and performance as to other factors. What are these other factors? You know: they are basically ‘connections’ and privilege. The reason why younger candidates seem to pop up at senior political levels in India, rather than at the municipal levels, is an indication of this.
If you do not have the right sort of connections, you might go through the municipal and local route. But if you do, why should you bother? You will get a ticket to start off directly as an MLA, if not an MP or a junior minister. The fact that you have no real political expertise, that you have not cultivated any local franchise, and that you have not proved yourself at a smaller scale, why, all these factors are immaterial if you have the right connections in India.
Of course, politics is not the only field where this obtains. To some extent, it is the case in other fields too. I distinctly recall that one of the factors that made me quit journalism in India and opt for academia (despite its own hierarchies) was my realisation that the way from being a staff reporter to becoming an editor was long and uncertain in a profession where some seemed to start too near the top. But politics in India, I am afraid, presents a far more extreme scenario than other professions, where it is less easy to hide a lack of performance behind the smokescreen of rhetoric and bombast.
We are told to be proudly ‘Indian’ about our large national achievements, real or proposed: leading from matters like our railway system, which is actually admirable despite the heavy pressures it faces, to proposed bullet trains. But, finally, large achievement might be less important than cumulative smaller ones. Nations might be made far less in metropolitan capitals and far more in every little municipality. National leaderships too.
I can’t help appreciating the fact that Danish municipal candidates seem much younger than their nation-level colleagues. It makes me feel that my vote at the municipal level matters and that, to some extent, performance and evaluation remain part of Danish (or French) politics. I mourn its lack in India because I am a proud Indian but, unfortunately, not a blind one.
