The Election Commission (EC) is technologically challenged. And no, this is not about the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) that have been in the eye of the storm that blew itself all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The system of level playing field and free and fair elections, intrinsic to how governments are elected in a democracy, requires an EC with updated rules and procedures, and capabilities to handle fast-paced changes in technology, especially communication networks. The 73-year-old rules impose a 48-hour silence in public campaigning. There are injunctions on the news media about opinion and exit polls.
There is, however, a gaping hole when it comes to telecasts and webcasts. Television and internet are unregulated and free to deliver campaign content to voters’ homes, mobiles, laptops, tablets and desktops, even as voting is in progress in the extraordinarily extended multi-phase polling schedule.
On April 19, when voting was in progress in all 39 constituencies of Tamil Nadu, all five constituencies in Uttarakhand and in 58 of the total 102 constituencies where polls were held, TV and internet were actively engaged in beaming live speeches by political leaders, including PM Narenda Modi. In the states where voting was in progress, political leaders, including supremos of regional parties, were canvassing votes, which was available on local TV channels and, of course, the internet.
A 48-hour period of pre-poll silence has, therefore, become notional. The EC, on the contrary, has no notion of what it should do to prevent voters from being influenced even as they queue up to vote. Since it imposed restrictions on opinion and exit polls, it should not have been difficult for it to work out how to prevent noisy campaigning from being beamed into voters’ lives.
The failure to prevent violation of its rules ought to be a priority for the EC, which every so often iterates its commitment to making sure there is a level playing field. The violation of the silence rule works to the disadvantage of smaller and regional parties in a Lok Sabha election, because national TV networks tend to focus on the ruling regime and offer up disproportionate slices of time to other ‘national’ parties and leaders. Regional parties do not have the same advantage.
Given that the BJP has included the ‘One Nation, One Election’ promise in its election manifesto and maintains that it has engaged in a consultative process by forming a committee headed by former president Ram Nath Kovind, the in-built discrimination in favour of the biggest and loudest increases disproportionately. If the election system is artificially reconstructed, regional and national parties would be locked in campaigning for both state and national elections at the same time.
In other words, parties like the AAP, TMC, the DMK, the CPI(M), RJD or even the BJD, the YSR Congress or the JD(S) would have to compete against parties like the BJP for time on national TV. Each regional and smaller party would get squeezed out or be relegated to competing against national parties even on local TV networks.
Instead of being political equals, the smaller and regional parties would be reduced to second class citizen status. Since there is already a hierarchy in the categorisation of political parties by the EC, any additional disadvantage would skew the principle of fairness in favour of the ruling establishment at the Centre.
An incensed Mamata Banerjee, TMC’s boss and West Bengal’s CM, recently lashed out at the EC, branding it the “BJP Commission”. An independent EC capable of dealing with change, both structural and infrastructural—such as technology—is expected of an institution that has almost limitless resources and ample money to do its job without being attacked as biased by its stakeholders. She clearly believed the institution had been influenced to the extent that it had lost its independence.
Mamata’s attack was directed against the mobilisation of central security forces and the effective ouster of state police by the EC on the one hand and the removals and appointments of senior police and administrative personnel on the other. This sent out a signal that the institution did not trust the professionalism of public officials in West Bengal. This clash of opinions during elections in the state is not new. It was very evident during the assembly elections of 2021, when the DGP was removed. This time, too, a slew of officials have been removed, including the current DGP.
The EC’s lack of trust, or rather outright suspicion, that public servants working in states are biased is evident from the removal of six home secretaries from as many states, including UP, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The lack of trust in the independence of the EC is equally problematic.
While it has become routine for the EC to remove senior government servants before and during elections, there is very little political parties or voters can do to remove people heading the institution. The deep distrust on all sides has grown with every election. From EVMs, to voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) verification by voters of votes cast, counting of VVPAT slips, to how the EC handles the deployment of security forces, state police and government officials, there is no part of the system that is not controversial.
For elections to be seen to be free and fair, there is a lot that the EC needs to do to end speculation and distrust about its functioning. Figuring out how to prevent violation of the pre-poll silence period is probably the easiest challenge it currently faces to its credibility.
(Views are personal)
(s_mukerjee@yahoo.com)
Shikha Mukerjee | Senior journalist based in Kolkata