Only a couple of days ago, when the Odisha Election Commissioner (EC), a former bureaucrat on bonus posting, did not take any exemplary action against complaints of violation of electoral rules, there was a huge public outcry. Frontline leaders from mainstream political parties including Atanu Sabyasachi Nayak and Dharmendra Pradhan were caught on camera openly campaigning for candidates contesting in non-partisan elections in gross violation of electoral principles and codes of conduct. The EC expresses seem expressing an anxious desire to back the strong parties by misinterpreting rules to suit the political heavyweights, particularly the ruling BJD.
No candidate up to the level of Zilla Parishad member can fight on a party ticket as per the Constitutional provision respecting the Gandhian principles of Gram Swaraj. Accordingly, no contestant can use any party symbol or have any party member campaigning for him on party lines. Strangely, most ECs of Odisha, probably barring Ajit Kumar Tripathy in 2012, has shown his claws and teeth while fixing erring behaviour and conduct of the rogue politicians. Another commissioner, though decently-behaved, had done precious little in 2009 when a BJD leader, holding the Speaker’s post, was caught red-handed carrying party posters in his official car during the general elections. He says even today that he told the police officials to take cognisance of the crime and file an FIR. But he never ensured it was done well. Nothing happened; the event was coolly forgotten; and the EC kept off duty by siding away cleverly. These bonus-grabbing former bureaucrats only do provide meaningless lip service to critical and contentious issues by having passed routine orders. Never once have they ensured exemplary action by way of dismissing contestants or having erring politicians removed from lofty posts. The main reason for the sad state of affairs is that the ECs don’t study the Constitution, which makes everything so clear. They grab the prized posts by promising uncompromising slavery when it would come to rescuing crooks in the game.
And that’s when the memories of a great Election Commissioner of India come floating into mind. Tirunellai Narayana Iyer Seshan is best remembered for having cleaned up elections in India. As Chief Election Commissioner, he put an end to all-pervasive electoral malpractices. Chandrasekhar, during his surprise short stint as PM in 1990, made Sheshan EC on the advice of his Finance Minister Subramanian Swami, who had taught the great bureaucrat at Harvard. Sheshan read up the Constitution thoroughly and asserted the enormous superiority of the commission to fix the merrily erring politicians. The ECs until then were only puppets in the hands of politicians.
Sheshan made photo ID cards mandatory, took control of the administration and police of the States going to polls and rammed through other electoral reforms. He established the Election Commission as a truly autonomous body that did not take orders from the Central Government. Seshan said he would give up the job if anybody could prove his actions were violating the Constitutional provision in the least, when they kept accusing him of ‘being a bull in a china shop’.
Seshan’s first location for wielding the broom was Bihar, the infamous cesspit of electoral malpractices like booth capturing, bogus voting, rigging and nonstop violent intimidation of voters. Cleaning up the 1995 Bihar Assembly polls was a mission-driven act. Seshan did impose a “free and fair” election on the graveyard of elections in Bihar and created history when lalu Prasad was the incorrigible dictator. Sheshan had sent an unprecedented 650 companies of paramilitary forces into the State, fragmented the voting event into four phases and even had four more postponements for places detected as highly sensitive. Elections notified on December 8, 1994 were over on March 28, 1995. Seshan ensured that Bihar’s politicians, including the formidable Chief mMinister lalu Prasad, trembled in their own dens. He travelled the length and breadth of India to the extent of stalling elections if he suspected that a free and fair one was not possible.
Seshan did, on purpose, pioneer and presage the brand of disdain and derision for the political class, painting it with broad bristle strokes as a bunch of corrupt carpetbaggers that needed strong medicine. “Do you think I should allow politicians to commit dacoity on democracyIJ” Seshan had once shot back when asked if he was not overdoing his restrictions on the electoral process in the name of cleansing it. “While I am here, it is I who will decide how elections are to be held; politicians have got away with nonsense for far too long.”
Way back in 1991, during the first of many run-ins with the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, Seshan had clinched a conversation and had his way on electoral norms with a bluntness that typified him. “Mr Prime Minister,” he had told Rao, “the only offices I aspire now are those of President and Prime Minister of India and, to my advantage, both are occupied.”
When he was accused of robbing the elections off their sound, colour and festive atmosphere, Seshan retorted that elections were serious business and not entertainment. “If they want sound and colour, the cinema halls are always open,” he had curtly said.
Ahead of the 1996 general election, the Narasimha Rao Government, in a bid to clip his wings, expanded the commission into a three-member body and drafted in MS Gill and GV Krishnamurthy as commissioners. The Government said the majority view among the three commissioners would be ‘the rule’. Seshan had a stormy relationship with these two puppets after he unsuccessfully challenged their appointment in the Supreme Court.
It is Seshan’s legacy of unshackling the Election Commission that has led to the present situation where political parties look up to the EC as a tough but impartial umpire. Seshan, now 84, lives with wife Jayalakshmi, shuttling between his suburban old-age home and Chennai house. The couple is childless. Seshan was born in Pallakad in Kerala to a Brahmin family. He topped in the IPS examinations in 1953, but a year after he joined the IAS, again as the topper. Jokingly would he say oftentimes, “My birthplace Pallakad is known for cooks and crooks. I could manage to become only a cook” as he made great ‘dosas’ in his kitchen for guests until age made him physically weak. Age has, of course, failed to dampen his spirit though only his stentorian voice has developed a quaver and his erect gait looks weakened due to arthritic knees. He now loves more privacy believing his prime time is over and the big people of today would not care for his eternally radical views.
After Seshan, the election commissioners have assumed the proportions of kings and the CEC the emperor in the domain of electioneering. Successive commissioners have never taken extra pain to show their claws or teeth. These weapons show up on their own, and the monarchs rule supreme unlike in the pre-Sheshan days. Without any doubt TN Sheshan shall remain in history indelibly as a nation builder, who reformed a rotten system only by studying the ‘will of the state’ called the Constitution. Unfortunately, most top politicians, bureaucrats and political science as well as public administration teachers don’t have any fundamental clarity about the spirit of the great Indian Constitution. Shockingly, more than sixty per cent of the Superior Court judges give out weird ideas about the Constitution only because ineligible lawyers have been hauled up to the Benches by guile through nepotism. No wonder, most Indians are suffering from injustice meted out by courts of law. The judges who know the basics are a minority and in perpetual trouble due to rabid jealousy of the lesser beings in the community. Maybe, the Collegium system has failed more miserably than imagined.
God save the country!
(The writer is a core member of Transparency International, Odisha)