The MLA who sold his mandate: defection is the original sin of these bypolls

Today, voters in Madurantakam and Dharapuram will do something the politicians of this state seem to have forgotten how to do: honour a mandate. The bypolls exist for one reason. Two legislators were elected on one party's symbol, resigned, joined the ruling party, and were promptly rewarded with renomination from the very seats they had just vacated. The voters had no say in the transaction. They are being asked, now, to ratify it. Call it what the Opposition calls it. Edappadi Palaniswami says horse-trading. Udhayanidhi Stalin says the Chief Minister is buying MLAs instead of buying votes. TTV Dhinakaran calls the government destructive. The vocabulary differs, but the diagnosis is the same: a mandate is being treated as a commodity, and the voter as a spectator to its resale. Defection is not new to Tamil Nadu, and no party's hands are clean. But there is something especially brazen about the current sequence. In the older art of defection, legislators at least had the courtesy to manufacture a grievance, a split, a merger. Here, the mask has been dropped entirely: resign, cross over, get renominated, ask the voter to bless the arrangement. The transaction is so open that it does not even bother to pretend. The anti-defection law was supposed to end this bazaar. It has become a manual for it instead: resign before you cross and the law has nothing to say. The voter, meanwhile, has no equivalent protection. There is no recall, no penalty for the legislator who treats an election victory as personal property to be carried from party to party like luggage. Periyar taught that democracy is not the arithmetic of elections but the morality of the elected. Anna built a movement on the dignity of the common voter against entrenched power. Both would have recognised today's spectacle for what it is: the reduction of the citizen to a rubber stamp on decisions already made in back rooms. When a legislator can sell his mandate and return to the same voters expecting a receipt, the insult is not to the rival party. It is to the voter. There is an argument, made by the ruling party's defenders, that the voters will decide and that is democracy enough. It is a poor argument. Consent manufactured after the fact is not consent. A voter who chose an AIADMK candidate and wakes to find a TVK candidate, with the same face, is not being offered a choice. He is being informed of one. October 9 will give us the results. But October 6 already gives us the verdict that matters: when resignations become a strategy and renomination the reward, the election ceases to be an instrument of the people and becomes a laundering machine for mandates. The voter in the queue today is not just choosing a candidate. He is deciding whether his vote is a trust or a transaction. Let us hope he remembers the difference, even if his legislators have forgotten it.