Broken promises

Speaking at a seminar in New Delhi this April in the presence of the now retired president Pranab Mukherjee, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of India Jagdish Singh Khehar held forth on the binding force of pledges in an election manifesto, a topic on which the subject of the seminar — electoral issues and economic reforms — bore an inextricable connection.

The judge lamented, “No consequence occurs whether promises are fulfilled or not… Even our legal system provides for no consequences to be suffered by political parties if promises made in the manifesto are not fulfilled. Uninformed citizenry, with a short-term memory, forgets and the election manifesto becomes a mere piece of paper... Caste issues are projected in different ways to ensure a majority in each constituency.”

Implementing his plea for legal sanction against broken electoral promises poses a problem, however, and one hopes Chief Justice Khehar can bring to bear his legal erudition and deep insight into this issue.

Political manifestos attracted public notice in England in the 19th century when political warfare was at its peak and political parties battled over their respective electoral mandates or lack thereof.

Sir William Ivor Jennings, a noted authority, analysed the debate in his book, Cabinet Government.

“A government exists only because it has secured a majority at an election, or is likely to secure such a majority when an election takes place: but it secures that majority by appealing to the electorate to support a policy. The electorate expects that the policy will be carried to fruition. It does not expect that radical changes will be made unless they were part of the party policy or are the necessary consequences of that policy. The government must, of course, meet emergencies if and when they arise, but, emergencies apart, major developments of policy should not be entered upon without that approval of the electorate which is secured by the return of a party to power.”

Yet, “(T)here may indeed be circumstances in which it is the duty of the government to ignore its lack of mandate and even to act counter to the mandate which it has received”.

The national interest, an emergency or change of circumstance might force a government to act contrary to the election manifesto on which it was voted to power.

Two English rulings by judges of eminence and learning are relevant. They concern local bodies, but the principles apply to legislatures (both central and states) as well.

In the Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council election of 1976, its control passed from Labour to the Conservatives. Labour was for abolishing grammar schools as selective entrance schools. The Conservatives were for preserving them and claimed a mandate for it since it was an issue in the polls. Evidently, London did not sympathise with Tameside and sought to overrule it.

The House of Lords set aside the centre’s view. It “failed to take into account that Tameside Council was entitled — indeed in a sense bound — to carry out the policy on which it was elected”. Another judge held that “the Conservatives could claim to have obtained a mandate… in the same way as a party which has won a general election can claim to have a mandate to carry out the proposals in its manifesto”.

In 1983, the issue before the House of Lords was whether Transport for London ought, as a matter of principle, to be run as a rate- or tax-financed public service or on commercial lines.

The lords ruled that members of the Greater London Council, while performing the collective duty of the GLC, must not “treat themselves as irrevocably bound to carry out pre-announced policies contained in election manifestos even though, by that time, changes of circumstances have occurred that were unforeseen when those policies were announced and would add significantly to the disadvantages that would result from carrying them out”.

Another judge said, “It is, of course, entirely appropriate for a council, the majority of whose members have been elected after setting out a particular policy in their election manifesto, to take into account, and give considerable weight to, that circumstance when exercising their discretion in relation to that policy after they have been elected and come to power. It is, however, entirely wrong for such a majority to regard themselves as bound to exercise their discretion in relation to that policy in accordance with their election promises, whatever the cost and other counter-vailing considerations may turn out to be.”

The GLC’s decision was held to be bad in law precisely because its members felt themselves bound by the manifesto and did not exercise their discretion as the law required of them.

By arrangement with Dawn