Apart from the unhealthy power of money in modern Democracies, the system of electioneering is very defective and undesirable. The existence of big constituencies makes direct and intimate contact between the voters and the candidates well-nigh impossible. This inevitably leads to ‘electioneering campaigns,’ the evils of which are only too well known to all of us. Bernard Shaw in his inimitable style describes such election meetings as ‘scandalous and disgusting spectacles at which sane and sober men yell senselessly until any dispassionate stranger looking at them would believe that he was in a lunatic asylum for exceptionally dreadful cases of mental derangement.’ “The older I grow,” continues Shaw, “the more I feel such exhibitions to be, as part of the serious business of the government of a nation, entirely intolerable and disgraceful to human nature and civic decency.”[30] The unwieldy constituencies, thus, do not ensure the right choice of the representatives. In place of Democracy, remarks Gandhiji, we see ‘Mobocracy.’ Decent, capable and silent men, therefore, shun the din and dust of such elections and the unscrupulous and ‘thick-skinned’ candidates carry the day with their handy weapons of bribery and corruption. Prohibitive expenses entailed in the elections naturally drive democracy into the arms of the capitalists who ultimately rule the roost.
