Election Commission collapses!

By M.Y.Siddiqui

Election Commission of India (ECI) has collapsed altogether in conducting free and fair elections in the ongoing General Elections to the Lok Sabha (House of the People) as has been witnessed from its conduct since the announcement of the polls schedule in March 2024. Article 324 of the Constitution of India confers on the ECI a reservoir of unbridled power to conduct free and fair elections. ECI should appear to be doing so. For such enormous tasks, the ECI has been vested with the power to exercise direction, superintendence and control of the electoral system. Entire government machinery, both of the Union and the States, is placed under the ECI till the electoral processes are over. In this backdrop, the ECI has lost public credibility for its failure to infuse public confidence in the fairness of country’s electoral processes. ECI has been in public glare for over a year about its impartial functioning.

It is no surprise that the state of our institutions has steadily degenerated to become camp followers of the ruling regime. They have become instrumentalities, not of the state, of the BJP. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is blind to the loot of the exchequer going on all around him, the ECI never speaks and the judiciary is deaf to the entreaties of civil society and citizens. One can list out instances where judiciary’s silence, biases and helpful interpretations of the law have contributed to the hollowing out of India’s democracy. From the appointments made in contravention of the Supreme Court’s guidelines of May 2, 2023 to the sudden unexplained exit of Election Commissioner Arun Goel, just days before the commencement of polls schedule, ECI’s muted response to the electoral bonds deemed unconstitutional, ECI has been questioned over the long polls schedule, postponing the polls in Anantnag, subversion of electoral processes in favour of BJP contestants in Surat, Indore and Khajurahu.

Some other important violations by the ECI relate to abandoning its established practice of sharing data on actual votes polled soon after polls closed in each phase, meeting the media each time, its silence on strident anti-Muslim hate speeches and misinformation laden campaign speeches of the Prime Minister, Home Minister and others of BJP are the clear signs that ECI has collapsed. Its public credibility to conduct free and fair polls has hit all time low indicating that ECI has collapsed. The time tested constitutional jurisprudence of justice, equality and fair-play with the dictum that no one is above the law and however high one may be the law is above all have been ignored willfully by the ECI making the present Chief Election Commissioner and the two other Commissioners unfit for the position they hold. All these just lead to severe criticism of ECI from scholars, experts, psephologosts, political pundits, legal luminaries and people in general, who watch the overall functioning of the ECI. It has failed completely in providing level playing fields for contesting political parties.

With the ECI responding to Congress President having no time attending to the full blown anti-Muslim ranting campaign by the PM and others of RSS Pariwar, serious doubts have been raised over the impartiality of ECI in the last ten years. Questions have been raised  about the scheduling of the elections and the continuing violations of Model Code of Conduct (MCC) with no action taken against the PM and senior leaders of the BJP when they violate the law and mobilise support in the name of religion or caste. Current ECI has lost public credibility because its conduct is perceived to be partisan. Without executive (government) self-restraint or institutional firewalls to safeguard the independence of the ECI, India’s democracy is almost dead. The dead do not rise and act. Autonomy of ECI, its powers to conduct free and fair elections are all dead, partly by the design of the Union government, partly due to self-abdicating role of the Supreme Court of India, and partly violations by election commissioners themselves, the lowest point the ECI has hit. There has not been a lowerer moment for the ECI. The questions, ECI faces, are self-inflicted.

ECI is no longer an umpire, but a political player in the General Elections 2024. This is a new low in the history of ECI. ECI would be judged by how it behaves with the ruling dispensation and not with the opposition. It was important to maintain credibility of the electoral process. ECI did not take action against the PM and others in the ruling RSS Pariwar. On the contrary, it was unprecedented in the history of the ECI that notices were not sent to those against whom there were a plethora of complaints had been filed, but to party presidents. ECI published voter turnout data after several days. Delayed data published by the ECI on April 30, 2024 shows a sharp increase by five to six percent in the first three phases, raising suspicion of tampering against the initial data on the day of polling, to the advantages of the ruling BJP.

Well meaning legal luminaries view the ECI as a co-conspirator with the PM and ruling party to subvert the General Elections 2024. ECI has become a long arm of the government. The Supreme Court’s recent judgment on electoral voting machines (EVMs) is disappointing. 

Section 123 of the Representation of People Act prohibits corrupt electoral practices read with the MCC not being implemented faithfully by the ECI. Election process is entirely polluted and vitiated. ECI should have immediately intervened and changed the decision of the Returning Officer in Surat. In this context, the way-out of this malaise is to legislate a law to make MCC and overhaul it to make it applicable to candidates, government, political parties and further overhaul of the entire corrupt practices as suggested by the Supreme Court in 1993 to make the  entire  electoral process really free and fair. Election Commissioners should also be made accountable to the people by overhauling their code of conducts and service conditions!

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