Over the past few elections, the concept of star campaigners for political parties have been gaining ground. They are picked by a political party for their popularity. The list has to be sent to the Election Commission of India. There is no specific definition of a star campaigner in the law excepting that the expenditure incurred by these campaigners are billed to the party and not the candidate.
The election expenditure limit for candidates is ₹95 lakh per Lok Sabha constituency in larger States and ₹75 lakh in smaller States. Hence, these star campaigners would be vote-fetchers for candidates set up by respective parties without affecting their expenditure limit.
The electoral laws do not stipulate who can or cannot be made a star campaigner. S/he could be a famous person, a political heavyweight, a movie star, a well-known celebrity, a sportsperson or wives of jailed leaders as in the case of Sunita Kejriwal and Kalpana Soren, wife of Hemant Soren.
With Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party’s best known face behind the bars, the ruling party of Delhi has been working out variations to give a push to their campaign. Sunita Kejriwal has been included in the list of Star Campaigners for the party in Delhi and other states like Gujarat, where it is fighting elections in alliance with the Congress.
However, in their stronghold of Delhi, its being now being said that the vacuum of a star campaigner created with the jailing of the three most prominent leaders of AAP – Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and Satyender Jain, has been inadvertently filled by the Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena.
Saxena has been courting one controversy after another, which is helping the opposition label him as an agent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). First it was his visit to Kerala on the eve of the polls in the state ostensibly to meet the influential leaders of the church. While it generated controversy locally and picked by the national media later, it has also spurred the opposition to file a complaint against him with the Election Commission.
Even before the Kerala controversy died down, the Raj Niwas ordered postponing of the election of the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) postponed the mayoral polls after the Raj Niwas issued a letter on behalf of Lieutenant Governor Saxena, stating that the appointment of a presiding officer could not be made in the absence of inputs from the chief minister, who is lodged in Tihar Jail in connection with a money laundering-linked excise policy case.
What has added grist to the whole controversy is that despite the attempts by the local unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to stoke dissent in the ranks of AAP and its alliance partner Congress, their councilors remained united and a consensus was reached on the selection of candidates. This meant a certain defeat for the BJP candidates, which they wanted to avoid as the campaign for the Lok Sabha polls is peaking in the national Capital.
While taking the decision, the Lieutenant Governor probably did not take into account the fact that this time the seat of Mayor was reserved for a member from the Dalit community. Now this is being trumpeted by AAP as the BJP’s attempt to deny the Dalits their rights. To which Saxena’s feeble defence of lack of inputs from the CM can be countered with the argument that why the Centre was not imposing President’s rule as “there was a breakdown of law and order machinery”.
A jailed Arvind Kejriwal is forcing the Lieutenant Governor into taking increasingly illogical decisions. The AAP’s cadres’ aggressive propaganda politics has put the local unit of the BJP on the back foot, which in turn has got onto the nerves of the Centre.
Thus some of the decisions taken by Saxena look to be a knee jerk reaction and they can be best described by the medieval English phrase, “You can’t eat the cake and have it to.”
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice