Introduction

A well-known 1957 political cartoon by the artist Shankar makes this same point in a sharper way. Captioned as showing the "carnival of democracy," it actually depicts election time as pure chaos -- a pointed reminder that simply holding an election, in itself, is no guarantee that the process is working fairly or that democracy is actually functioning well.

This naturally raises a further question: if elections need such carefully settled, impartial rules, why must those rules be written into the constitution at all, instead of being decided fresh by Parliament, or agreed upon by all the political parties before each election? The answer is that leaving election rules to Parliament, or to agreement among parties, would hand control of the rules to the very people contesting the election -- whichever party controlled Parliament at the time, or refused to agree, could tilt the rules to suit itself. Writing the basic rules of the electoral contest into the constitution instead puts them beyond the reach of whichever government or party happens to be in power at a given mom …