When Anna Hazare’s supporters conducted a ‘referendum’ right in union minister Kapil Sibal’s constituency, they found that 85 percent people in Chandni Chowk do not agree with the government stance on the Lokpal bill. That is one conclusion of this first-of-its-kind exercise. The more interesting conclusion is this: Sibal as MP is supposed to represent his constituency’s views on parliament, but he is not going to do so. How is that for a democracy?

(By the way, Chandni Chowk residents are still better off when you think of Pune people. Their representative, Suresh Kalmadi, is currently not able to put even his own views before parliament, not to speak of the views of his voters.)

In democracy as practised here, once we elect our representative to parliament, we can stop thinking. The MP will do so on our behalf. He or she is the voice of 10 lakh people, for five years, on any given issue.

My neighbour and I may have differences on the Lokpal, or my cousin’s views on the proposed communal violence  prevention bill may change a year later, but all of us need to waste our energies on such debates, our MP (L K Advani in my case) will decide on our behalf.

This system makes several assumptions, one of which is that the MP will remain in touch with the constituency, gauge public mood and act or vote accordingly. When was the last time it happened this way? In fact, there is a strong reason an MP is not supposed to listen to the voter. For every voting in the house, he or she has to abide by the party line as communicated by the whip. In other words, Sibal would very much like to act according to the popular demand in order to retain his seat, but he can’t.

Now, is this party line decided democratically? As professor Jagdeep Chhokar has pointed out in the cover story of the latest issue of Governance Now (part of his timely series on the electoral reforms), no head of any major party has been truly elected (not counting stage-managed polls) after a free and fair election within the cadre.

What does it imply? It means all political decisions on issues concerning our lives are decided by a handful of individuals, the top leaders of five or seven parties. This, then, is not a system designed to give voice to people’s aspirations. This is a system designed to make the life of a lobbyist easy: you represent a business group or association and want the land acquisition law or some tax regime changed, then you need not bother to mould the opinion of all the voters across the country. Just approach a couple of party bosses.

As you can see, the argument comes back to the link between corruption and lack of real democracy. How can the democracy as practised here be given some depth? Given that there is no democracy within political parties, and given that MPs are supposed to vote according to the party high command’s line, the only way to deepen democracy is going to come from civil society. That is the larger message from Chandni Chowk. In other words, politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians.