Don't hang the ECI just yet

Before deciding that the Election Commission of India has been unfair to the Opposition, we need to enable it to work efficiently and transparently

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has been put in the dock, thanks to a report in The Indian Express suggesting that two of the election commissioners have had differences with the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) on some critical issues, including the conduct of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. While Opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, have long made the alleged partiality of the ECI an issue, the Express report seems to give them ammunition that they previously lacked. The demand is that CEC Gyanesh Kumar resign.

 

While election commissioners cannot be removed unless they are impeached by Parliament, the Commission should, in the interests of its own credibility, discuss the issues raised internally and then transparently tell the public how it is conducting its business, and how it will set things right in future. While the ECI has put out a bland statement that its decisions were by consensus, it would help clear the air if all three commissioners were to address the media and take questions both collectively and individually.

 

But it would also be wise to not jump to any conclusion on the alleged biases of the ECI. We have to note the constraints under which the Commission has to work to keep the machinery of electoral democracy working. It has to handle close to a billion voters with limited resources. It would be more constructive to suggest effective remedies so that snafus like the exclusion of millions of voters can be avoided. A key point to note is this: One need not assume conspiracy and unfairness in the Commission’s working when complexity and occasional incompetence can adequately explain the problems thrown up in the Express report. Here’s why.

 

First, the Commission has barely 550 direct employees in its secretariat in Delhi, and smaller numbers in various states, some of which are larger than entire countries. This core group can commandeer 10-12 million temporary personnel from states and other civil services during a nation-wide general election, but it is effectively dependent on state governments to provide it the people to run post- and pre-election work like updating voter lists and conducting elaborate exercises like SIR.

 

Inevitably, it will have to use information technology to help it with the scale of work, and this will increasingly determine how well it can include eligible voters. When software is used to identify and throw up eligible and ineligible voters in the current list, it can lead to large-scale errors and glitches. But these errors can be corrected and the software improved in its next iteration.

 

Second, the figure of 130 million likely exclusions from the voter lists due to SIR has been mentioned in the Express report. This seems very large by any standalone measure, but it needs to be contrasted with two other numbers: The annual death rate, and the size of the internal migrant population. Up to 10 million people die in India annually, and a substantial chunk of them will be older people who will surely be voters. But the migrant population is truly staggering. According to Census 2011 estimates, some 455 million Indians are internal migrants, and this number could only be larger today.

 

When you migrate for work or other reasons (study or marriage), either within the state or to a different state, the chances of you being in two voter lists are high. This is because migrants may be registered at home and also in the places they work, and the routine work of deleting one does not happen.

 

Speaking from personal experience, I have worked in four major cities, and from 13 or 14 different addresses in these cities. I was not enrolled as a voter till I had crossed the age of 30, and in two cities (Delhi and Kolkata), I had no vote at all. In the remaining two cities, I did not formally try to delete my name or change my address when I moved, and it is likely that my name remained in some of those lists even after I had left. Any update of voter lists will have to remove my name from at least one or two places where I do not stay anymore. If this is the case with me, why would this not happen on a massive scale among migrant workers? Few people I know bother to get their names deleted when they move. Large-scale deletions are necessary to clean up the voter lists and add those who are now 18 or older.

 

Three, the problem could be with the software that seeks to identify duplications and the deceased. With no human oversight possible on such large databases, clearly the Commission has its work cut out in ensuring that deletions are cross-checked by someone with more commonsense than a software that merely throws up “logical” discrepancies, especially when names and addresses may be misspelt badly or wrongly. In a country with such a large migrant population, there will be hundreds showing the same address as their residence. They can’t all be disenfranchised without a human recheck.

 

Four, one criticism of the SIR exercise is that it has found very few illegal immigrants on the voters’ lists. And most of those deletions that went into appeal in West Bengal did not turn out to be illegals. But can one expect an SIR exercise to do what a National Register of Citizens (NRC) must do painstakingly?

 

Five, and this is a clear takeaway from the SIR issues. SIR may be vital, but trying to do it just months before a state or general election puts too much pressure on the human resources available. And when state governments decide to be uncooperative, like the one in West Bengal, which put every obstacle in the ECI’s way to disrupt the conduct of SIR, the exercise cannot be done well. This should lead us to a simple conclusion: Before an election, only summary revisions must be allowed; SIRs should be done in the five years after, before the next Assembly or general elections.

 

To sum up, five conclusions are mandated.

 

1.The Supreme Court should set clear guidelines for the conduct of ECI business, especially how it builds consensus or votes on critical issues. These should be recorded so that we know who said what in these meetings, and why some decisions were taken. We know that two commissioners did not always agree with the CEC on some issues, but we don’t know whether both commissioners were against the CEC on every decision flagged by the Express report, or one of them agreed with the CEC, thus making a lawful majority.

 

2.The Commission clearly needs more permanent staff.

 

3. If the ECI is not to be burdened with the task of weeding out non-citizens from the voter lists, the NRC is a must. A political consensus must be built for conducting an NRC every decade, possibly midway between two Censuses.

 

4. Whenever SIR is done, political parties must help with the process. Whenever they did — as in Kerala and Tamil Nadu — the SIR work went smoothly.

 

5. To eliminate the dead, some way of using civil death registers along with the voter lists must be found.

 

So, before we decide that the ECI has been unfair to the Opposition, we need to start making these changes so that the Commission can indeed work efficiently and transparently.

 

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The writer is a senior journalist