It is true that for contesting election to the American presidency one has to spend billions of rupees and one is still not sure whether or not he would become tenant of the White House for four years.
The Americans want their president to be a paragon of virtues.They know who has contributed how much and why in the party funds of a candidate .They expect their president to be a man of impeccable financial integrity,honest to a fault ,so to speak.They cannot tolerate a person who doesn’t go by the law of land.When Nixon realised that he has been caught on the wrong foot in the Watergate scandal he had to resign as he knew he is going to land in jail if he was tried by a court of law.What was his crime?He had ordered for the tapping of the proceedings of the convention of opposition Democrat party——- a crime which might have gone unnoticed had it been committed in a place like Pakistan .What did the Americans do with Bill Clinton when it was proved that he had committed a sexual offence?Many similar instances can be quoted to show the high standard of probity which the Americans expect from their presidents.The same goes for many European countries where every political party elects its leader after a lot of inquiry because he is under the search light and public and media scrutiny throughout his stint in office.
Unfortunately we lag far behind in this respect.We claim to be a practising democracy but it is a sham democracy Isn’t it? How can political parties practise democracy in a country where you don’t have any Democratic system for holding intraparty elections?Most of the appointments on key cadres inside the political parties are made on nominations and their selection is then wangled by the so-called party elections through a handpicked limited electorate.The elections are not held from bottom to top.It is the other way round.Small wonder almost all the key positions in the party cadres have been occupied in all the parties worth their salt by close relatives of the party chiefs.
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