A practitioner's guide to elections

Former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi is honest and unreservedly generous in his book, which does not shy away from identifying the biggest threat to free and fair elections India

India’s Experiment with Democracy: The Life of a Nation through its Elections

Author: S Y Quraishi 

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 552

Price: Rs 699

With India’s election season kicking off, can books on elections be far behind? This one, by a former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi (who was CEC between 2010 and 2012), will likely be the most credible and comprehensive. Mr Quraishi has double qualifications — he was also a pillar of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the first Muslim from Old Delhi to have acquired that distinction, meriting an editorial in The Hindustan Times. He also records that he is an acknowledged expert on German grammar and many took advantage of this; and while at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, he founded a rock band that survives to this day.

Mr Quraishi has organised the book around three themes: The conduct of elections; laws related to polls; and the stories around the men who supervised India’s elections, the global “gold standard” per Senator Hillary Clinton. He touches on the issue of simultaneous elections and says the idea is a good one in principle because multiple elections drag down administration, but political consensus needs to be evolved around it. He also suggests other ways of strengthening the democracy framework so that frequent elections are avoided, such as disincentivising MLAs and MPs from changing party loyalties. He flags the issue of state funding of elections (“an idea worth considering”) and a cap on the expenditure incurred by political parties in polls, including a ban on private and corporate fund collection by parties (at the very least, he advocates lifting the secrecy around electoral bonds).

Mr Quraishi talks about bribery in polls — freebies and such — but also records the increasing role of money in elections that led to the unprecedented step of the Election Commission (EC) cancelling two Assembly elections in Thanjavur and Aravakurichi constituencies in 2016 for corrupt practices. He expresses his surprise that the Narendra Modi government, despite its avowed intention of weeding out black money, rejected the proposal twice that the EC be given permanent powers to cancel elections on credible evidence of abuse of money. He touches on the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), the role of Governors and other aspects of holding elections, including the role of exit polls, media and hate speech.

In this context, the laws that govern elections become extremely important. The backbone of the polls is the Representation of People’s Act (RPA). But there are a host of issues with which the EC has to contend. These include party splits (the latest being the Shiv Sena) and who should be given control of the symbol. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) split between founder Sharad Pawar and his nephew and breakaway leader Ajit Pawar is an ongoing saga. The last word has not been said on the split in the Lok Janshakti Party after the death of Ramvilas Paswan and the struggle for control between his son Chirag and relative Paras. The 2017 split in the Samajwadi Party (SP) between Akhilesh Yadav and father Mulayam Singh Yadav led to an electoral disaster for the party from which it is yet to recover. Interpretation of rules lies with the EC, and political (and financial) fortunes of thousands are linked to these decisions.

In this context the EC becomes a pivot of power. When Mr Modi dissolved the Gujarat Assembly in 2002 after the Gujarat riots and wanted elections to be held quickly, the EC judged it was too soon as law and order had not normalised. At public meetings, Mr Modi uttered the words “James Michael Lyngdoh” (CEC 2001-04) leaving the crowd under no illusion that he differed with the EC. He also referred to Mr Lyngdoh’s religion (Vadodara rally 2002). This is possibly the first time a CEC featured in politics so directly.

The matter was referred to the President of India who referred it to the Supreme Court, which sided with the EC. Although Mr Quraishi does not refer to this incident, he does talk about two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-government EC appointees, O P Rawat and A K Jyoti, who ruled impartially in the 2014 Gujarat Rajya Sabha election when two Congress MLAs cross-voted in BJP’s favour and showed their vote to the BJP in violation of secrecy. The Congress was furious and wanted the election cancelled. But the votes had already been mixed in the ballot box. Who was to say who voted which way? Messrs Jyoti and Rawat ruled there was no dispute. Mr Quraishi applauds them.

While Mr Quraishi has unreserved admiration for T N Seshan and Sukumar Sen, India’s first CEC (1950-58), there are some controversies he has not addressed. M S Gill went from being a senior bureaucrat to CEC and then a Congress MP. He is the first CEC to have become a minister in the central government. This casts a shadow on his objectivity in some of the rulings he may have given in election disputes. You could argue that Seshan, who contested the election for President against KR Narayanan and lost should be judged by the same yardstick. Mr Quraishi does not refer to either. Nor does he speak about the only resignation of an Election Commissioner: Ashok Lavasa from Mr Quraishi’s own cadre, Haryana, who differed on whether PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah had violated the Model Code of Conduct.

The book is completely honest and unreservedly generous. Mr Quraishi does not shy away from identifying the biggest threat to free and fair elections — communalism. And he pays handsome compliments to other scholars, including Ornit Shani for studying elections. The data in the appendices is a bonus. It is truly the practitioner’s guide to Indian elections.