The Struggle for India's Soul by Tharoor Shashi;

Author:Tharoor, Shashi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Published: 2021-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

But even while Jaitley was alive, a former Chief Justice, P. Sathasivam, was appointed by the Modi Government to the post of Governor of Kerala. That Chief Justices, like Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion, now seems to be a principle honoured in the breach in Mr Modi’s India.

India’s Election Commission has enjoyed a proud record of independence and boasts decades-long experience of conducting free and fair elections, despite its members usually being retired civil servants appointed by the Government of the day for fixed tenures. While in the past, Election Commissioners have largely enjoyed a reputation for integrity, this took a severe blow in 2018, when a BJP-appointed Chief violated the convention of announcing election dates for all impending state elections at the same time. A quarter century ago, the Commission had introduced a Code of Conduct that prohibits government expenditure to impress voters once election dates are announced. With the BJP, which was in power in both the Centre and in Gujarat state in 2018, scrambling to impress voters in Gujarat through lastminute schemes, and pre-election freebies, the EC came under pressure to delay the election announcement there as long as possible. Giving in, it surprisingly declared the dates for elections in Himachal Pradesh, a state that normally goes to the polls at the same time as Gujarat, thirteen days before the latter, citing a specious need to permit flood relief work in Gujarat (which the Code of Conduct would not in fact have disallowed).

Former Election Commissioners condemned the decision,13 even as the Gujarat government and the Prime Minister himself took advantage of the delay to announce a series of pre-election giveaways. It does no good to Indian democracy to see a shadow fall over the very institution that guarantees free and fair elections, especially at a time when reports of data manipulation by the likes of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica began to raise doubts over the security of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) on which ballots are cast.14 But Mr Modi had shown his contempt for the institution during his early days as Chief Minister of Gujarat, when he had taken a dig at then Chief Election Commissioner, J. M. Lyngdoh, at a public rally near Vadodara in August 2002. “Some journalists asked me recently, ‘Has James Michael Lyngdoh come from Italy?’,” Modi declared, spelling out the CEC’s full name to highlight its Christian antecedents. “I said, I don’t have his janam patri, I will have to ask Rajiv Gandhi. Then the journalists said, ‘Do they (Lyngdoh and Sonia) meet in church?’ I replied, ‘Maybe they do’.”15 Lyngdoh, to his credit, was undeterred, but Mr Modi had made his expectations of the Election Commission clear.

The concern that under BJP rule, the Election Commission was behaving like a government department, became more acute when the Delhi High Court threw out an EC decision to disqualify twenty Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) members of the Delhi Legislature (MLAs) on technical grounds, an action that could have benefited the BJP had by-elections to their seats followed.

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