Is the Election Commission Overawed ?

              Is the Election Commission Overawed ?

                               

 By Jawhar Sircar

          ( Ananda Bazar Patrika, 11th April ‘19 —English version)

        Long before Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Trinamool Congress started raising their voices against the Election Commission’s alleged bias, a group of some 150 retired officials of the IAS, IFS, IPS and Central Services had already started waving the ‘yellow card’ at the Commission that is led by three officers of the same tribe. The difference is also that while people may not have forgotten the recent Panchayat elections in West Bengal that were conducted most unfairly by the Trinamool regime or the infamous ‘rigged elections’ under Siddharta Shankar Ray or later under the Left Front, no such history bogs down the the retired officers group who have now pooled their experience together under the name ‘Constitutional Conduct’. This group consists of a past Chief Election Commissioner and former State Chief Electoral Officers as also numerous ex-Returning Officers and Central Observers— all of whom have handled several elections long before the present CEC members arrived. They are, naturally, in a better position to judge their ‘younger colleagues’ in the present Commission especially when they appear to deviate from the principles of fair play — that they are duty-bound to adhere to under Article 324 of the Indian Constitution and the Representation of the People Act of 1951.

              During discussions over the last several months, this group met the-then CEC and explained to the Election Commission that since doubts had been expressed by many about the possibility of tampering with the EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines, alternate measures must be considered seriously. It was, incidentally, this very generation of officials who had introduced the EVM system in India in the closing years of the twentieth century so enthusiastically, and it is now the same group that now feels that these machines may not be as foolproof as was believed earlier. After all, technology and hacking techniques have both improved in the last two decades, while fairness has come down in public life. Thus, a new system called the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, must be introduced as it proved successful in the 2014 polls, when it was first tried out on experimental basis. Under this system, it is possible to check one’s vote because as soon as a voter punches his or her choice on the EVM, a small printer next to it pops out a paper ballot slip. This would tell the voter that the vote has been correctly recorded and, internationally, the option is either to put this paper into a ballot box placed near the EVM for these to be counted later or to tear up the slip after the voter is satisfied. The Constitutional Conduct group mentioned to the Election Commission that its plan to use just one VVPAT or Paper Trail per Assembly Constituency, which means 7 per parliament seat, was ridiculously low as a sample. It insisted that this percentage of ‘paper trails’ should go up substantially in each parliament constituency, to really represent a reliable sample of the total number of the polling booths, which was as high as 1500 to 2000.

       Now, some political parties are insisting on cent percent counting of ‘paper trails’, though this may not be possible in 2019. But it is only fair to expect that the Election Commission settles for a reasonable number of booths where ‘paper trails’ shall be made compulsory, somewhere between present figure of 7 and the total number of 1500-2000 booths per parliamentary constituency. This is what the retired officers have repeatedly advised the Commission. But the attitude of the present three-member Commission to fight this issue out in the courts appears rather odd, especially in response to a PIL filed by 21 political parties before the Supreme Court. The Commission has declared that counting of even half of these paper-trail votes many take six days, which sounds quite exaggerated. Even when we counted paper ballots under the old system of ballot boxes, the whole process took between 12 and 18 hours. In unionised states like West Bengal, this sometimes stretched to a few hours more, as counting staff reportedly delayed the counting process, in order to extract more ‘tiffin allowance’ and other rewards. Some parties have clearly stated that accurate results are more important than delayed results and the Constitutional Conduct group insists from the collective experience of so many hands-on experienced officers that it just cannot take so long. The real reason why the Commission is acting so difficult is not clear, but let us go into some recent happenings to draw our own conclusions.

         The Prime Minister appears to have overawed the present Commission that did not consider his brazen efforts to project macho ultra-national pride and also to appropriate decades of the nation’s achievements in the space sector by destroying a satellite in space to be crossing the red line during the period covered by the Model Code of Conduct. It refused to stop the ruling party from releasing a bio-pic on the PM that everyone is talking about and it did nothing to prevent the public streaming of a web documentary ‘Modi: A Common Man’s Journey’ on Eros Now — despite protests. This emboldened the ruling establishment to go to the unprecedented length of starting a television channel called NaMo, named after the Prime Minister, and while the concerned official agencies cringe in fear, the constitutionally-protected Election Commission, headed by the former Broadcasting secretary, is resorting to bureaucratic games. The retired officers and many other parties and groups have approached the Commission but it just looks the other way. Never since Sukumar Sen set up the Election Commission in the early 1950s and TN Seshan strengthened it in the early 1990s, have we seen such deliberate inaction from the Commission. 

     But the present Commission does not hesitate to take selective action against those governments that Modi dislikes by transferring its top officials, while the DGP of Tamil Nadu, that is ruled by the PM’s ally, continues to boss around election arrangements — even though he has a proven track record of political bias and criminal charges against him. There appears little point in mentioning that a Governor made clearly political statements without even a line from the Commission, that proved equally ineffective when Adityanath Yogi, CM of Uttar Pradesh, got away by declaring the Indian Army to Modi’s own. The first phase of the polls is about to begin and morning clearly shows the day. If we are to have really fair polls in Independent India’s most critical elections, the present Election Commission must be taken to task either by a ‘hue and cry’ at every act of favouritism, or by the courts — preferably by both.