Commission & omissions

EC has not upheld the spirit of the law

Whatever the final results for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it is fair to say that the Election Commission (EC) has emerged from the 36-day exercise with a marked diminution of its prestige. Having been prodded to consider complaints against gross transgressions by both ruling party and Opposition candidates in one of the least edifying campaigns on record, it now presents the spectacle of internal discord. One of the election commissioners, Ashok Lavasa, has recused himself from attending the EC meetings to discuss violations of the Model Code of Conduct, saying his minority dissenting view had gone unrecorded. Mr Lavasa has been at the centre of a controversy, having opposed five clearances that the EC gave to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah for making obvious references to religion in the course of their campaigns and invoking the Balakot strikes. Under EC rules, majority decisions prevail and the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) has argued that minority decisions do not get recorded because code violations are not quasi-judicial decisions. 

This view may hew to the letter of the EC’s mandate but not to its spirit. It is an open question, for instance, whether it should have approved the use of government resources to televise the prime minister’s visit to Kedarnath at a time when all campaigning had mandatorily ended; this would not have been an issue had the visit occurred during campaigning. It is also worth wondering why it allowed both Mr Modi and Mamata Banerjee a whole day to campaign in Bengal before it shortened the campaigning period over some reprehensible poll violence the day before.

Given the fierce whataboutery that dominates the public debate in recent years, it is fair to say that previous ECs have not exactly covered themselves in glory either, nor have political establishments in dealing with them. There is the 2009 example of CEC N Gopalaswami recommending the removal of his colleague Navin Chawla for political partisanship (Mr Chawla was considered close to the Congress party). In 2002, Mr Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, had suggested that then CEC J M Lyngdoh had turned down his request to call early Assembly elections after communal riots in the state because he was Christian. The introduction of the three-member committee in 1989 was the result of the display of some unwarranted independence by then EC R V S Peri Sastri, who is credited with introducing some wide-ranging electoral reforms in his time. This was struck down by the Supreme Court only to be revived in 1993 to rein in T N Seshan, who displayed an inconvenient predilection for independent action that discomfited politicians of all hues. Both Peri Sastri and Mr Seshan set new standards of objectivity for the EC — till then a somewhat pliant institution — that earned it considerable public respect for institutional impartiality. This hard-won reputation has been whittled away since the 2000s. At least part of the weakness lies in the fact that EC appointments are in the hands of the executive that the EC has to govern. In that sense, Mr Lavasa has shown courage in speaking truth to power. It’s a pity the EC has chosen to ignore his well-considered view.