The ink-stain on a finger of my left hand has now been reduced to a tiny black speck on my fingernail. It is the only remaining sign of the fact that on the morning of April 10, I went into a room of the local Government school and voted. Compare this to my cousins in Kolkata who will possibly stand in a queue for an hour or more on May 12 and get the mandatory ink stain on a finger. By the time, their voting mark is prominent, the ink stain on my finger would have disappeared altogether.
To organise an election in a country that is as vast and infuriatingly complex as India is a mind-boggling proposition. The sheer scale of an exercise stretching over two months is what prompted a British academic to remark that elections are one of the few things Indians “are good at.” Maybe this is also what Chief Election Commissioner VS Sampath meant when, amid a needlessly rambling Press conference last Thursday, he referred to the constitutional body he heads as a “national heritage.”
The problem with such an analogy is obvious. Experience suggests that India is either too casual or too deferential in coping with items of heritage. The Taj Mahal has become India’s most recognisable symbol. Yet, until a few years ago, the country was unconcerned at the havoc industrial pollution was doing to its white marble. Even now, the monument itself is well looked after — none of the Shunty-loves-Bunty graffiti that some Indians love to scrawl on old buildings — but its approach through Agra is hugely disagreeable. Despite the fact that Agra contributes disproportionately to India’s tourism economy, very little has been done to improve the condition of the city. The same is the case with Varanasi, a city which its most prominent parliamentary aspirant described as “India’s spiritual capital.”
To mention the imperfect underbelly of items of national heritage isn’t being disloyal to India or even the famed “idea of India” that is agitating so many of our intellectuals these days. On the contrary I would argue that relentless criticism is a precondition for constant self-improvement.
It is sad that the EC doesn’t approach criticism in the same spirit. There can be no doubt that the body has done a great job. Indeed, every successive election has seen some improvement or the other to enhance India’s democratic credentials. This is not merely because India has been blessed with some extremely competent Election Commissioners, even if some were inclined to be somewhat over-bearing. The improvements have also been on account of intelligent use of technology and growing public awareness.
Given this background, did the BJP err in mounting a huge criticism of the EC for its failure to check the alleged high-handedness and lapses of the Returning Officer for the Varanasi constituency where Narendra Modi is a candidateIJ Does criticism of the EC go against the spirit of democracyIJ There are no absolute answers. I would imagine that if a candidate is denied the basic right to hold a public meeting in any section of a constituency, it constitutes a denial of his democratic rights. It is indeed possible that there were potential security risks in Modi holding an election meeting in an area of Varanasi. The RO had every right to be mindful of this threat. The question is: how should he have respondedIJ
Common sense plays a large role in administration. To my mind, RO Pranjal Yadav should have invited Modi’s election agent for a discussion, informed him of the security threats and together worked out an alternative approach. Instead, and assuming that there indeed was a security concern (which is debatable), he played ducks and drakes with the BJP, gave misleading information, engaged in double-speak and finally said “No”. The impression he conveyed was of a man who was perhaps acting on instructions to make life as difficult for the Modi campaign as possible. Maybe this impression was wrong but the RO did precious little to disabuse his critics. On the contrary, there is now a fair amount of evidence to suggest that the security threat was contrived and that the RO was not playing with a straight bat. I hope the EC conducts a meaningful inquiry and judges for itself whether the “professional” inputs it received from its RO was indeed a considered one. If the inquiry exonerates Yadav well and good. But if the opposite is found to be true, some exemplary action is warranted.
A point to note is that the BJP’s doubts of the RO’s neutrality had been building up steadily. What the EC needs to examine in particular is the grave charge that voter slips for two urban segments of the Varanasi constituency were deliberately not distributed to voters at their place of residence. If true, this is a heinous crime and totally unpardonable offence because it hits at the very rationale of the election — the exercise of popular choice.
This election has shown up the EC’s vulnerabilities on two counts. The first was the mass scale deletion of voters from the electoral rolls in some big cities, notably Mumbai and Bangalore. That most of the deleted names happened to be middle class and a disproportionate number of them had Gujarati surnames gives rise to the impression that there was more that administrative inefficiency that was at stake. Was it a case of ‘political cleansing’IJ In any event, the apology of one Election Commissioner isn’t good enough. There has to be a review of what really happened.
Finally, this election is unfortunate in one major respect: it has witnessed the return of rigging. The horror stories emanating from some parts of West Bengal, central UP and Assam cannot be brushed aside as small aberrations. Unless the EC declares a policy of zero tolerance of rigging, it should come under sustained pressure from citizens and political parties.
There are a lot of things the EC has done well. But there are large areas where its work has not been up to expectations. Saying so openly and loudly doesn’t hurt democracy. It merely hurts the fragile egos of people who imagine themselves to be infallible.