ELECTIONS-THE DANCE OF DEMOCRACY OR...

It’s another election season in the country. I have heard it being described as the dance of democracy. But the reality is far from it. Way back in 2002, in an unpublished article ‘Democracy? East is East and West is West…’ I had written:

Out, party-based democracy; In, real democracy. It is a fact that party-based democracy itself has failed in this country. So will the Presidential system, as in the US of A, work in our context? No guarantee, there. But can’t we think afresh, keeping in mind the lessons we have learnt from our own experiences in the past fifty years? Shouldn’t we tailor our solutions to suit our problems? Here is one suggestion: Our government should function at three levels. Villages should form the units of administration. Villages should be linked through computer networks to the next level of governance, that is the State. States should be linked to the government at the Center. Polls should be conducted to elect representatives to an Electoral College (EC). These representatives, Members of Electoral College (MEC), can be one per 500 or 1000 of the population, but should necessarily be one amoung them. MECs from the village will function as the Village Panchayat (VP). The VP will send a representative from amoung them to the State Legislature (SL) on need basis. This need will be decided by the agenda before the Legislature and the competence of the MEC to address the issues in the agenda. The agenda, of course, will be circulated by the State Secretariat well in advance so that the issues are discussed thoroughly at the VP and every VP can send its best spokesperson for the occasion to the SL. A similar exercise can follow for issues at the national level taken up for consideration in the Parliament. Of necessity, the discussions should start at the VP, ensuring the best democratic process at work always. And there shall never be defections and toppling of governments for the five years for which each Electoral College shall function!

(You may read the full article at http://suchnaexpress.blogspot.com/2011/01/democracyeast-is-east-and-west-is-west.html)

Utopian? Or just mere flights of fancy? You are free to decide. Except for the change that necessarily will have to be painful, I am sure it is workable.

That our electoral processes is riddled with problems is a fact that none can deny. But more than the problems at the execution level, which we shall touch upon later, there are grossly illogical and wayward policies that dominate our electoral process. We can call them genetic defects.

A Whatsapp message, attributed to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, begins with the observation ‘while even under trials in prison cannot vote, convicts in prison can contest elections’. And in our context conviction implies the ultimate conviction by the apex court, which can take as much as the life of one generation. Even then the law is explicit that even those convicted, with less than 2 years imprisonment as punishment, can stake claims to be a law maker! As if there is dearth of citizens with unblemished records.

The next obvious defect is the lack of any prescribed qualifications, qualities or experience for being a law maker.  A question of providing equal opportunity? Please do not make me cry at a joke.

Another defect is the questionable provision for a candidate to contest from more than one constituency at a time. Is there any need to elaborate on the absurdity of this?

A related issue is of candidates being thrust on constituencies where they are not ordinarily resident. This is obviously a basic flaw with party based democracy whereby the candidates who win remain beholden to party leadership and not to the ones who elected them. There is no reason why one amongst the residents of a constituency cannot be put up to represent them. It should be made legally mandatory for a candidate to be a resident of the constituency from where he is contesting elections. The period of residence should be at least 5 years for state assemblies and 10 years for the Parliament. (All these are short term changes with the long term change being the one advocated at the beginning itself.)

The next objectionable issue is the back door entry of politicians into the Parliament. I mean politicians, failed or about to be written off, taking the Rajya Sabha route to Parliament. The Upper House is actually conceived as a body of specialists, professionals and others who have proved their worth is different spheres of activities and whose expertise would add to the overall performance of the Parliament. But except film stars and may be a cricketer or two this body is also seen to be hijacked by politicians.

What to talk of election manifestoes which are not worth the paper they are printed on? There is an online petition I had initiated demanding that these manifestoes must be legally binding on the parties presenting them. (The petition is available at https://www.change.org/p/the-president-probity-in-elections-by-eliminating-frauds-in-election-manifestoes) The following requirements have been highlighted:

The promises made in the manifesto should be listed priority wise for implementation. There could be three priorities-must do, should do, could do. While all promises under must do have to be fulfilled, it could be 90 pc for the should do and 80 pc for the could do priorities. The phased program of implementation should also be specified and should not go beyond 5 years. For every percentage short fall there should be penalties at deterrent rates for the three categories.

The resources required for implementing should be specific.

The means by which the resources will be mobilised should also be specified in detail.

There should be no freebies for anybody.

Amoung the seemingly proactive changes that have been brought in by the Election Commission, goaded by the judiciary, is the need to file affidavits by the candidates about their wealth and that of their relations. Also to be filed are the details about their convictions in criminal cases and their involvement in ongoing criminal cases. Unfortunately, this has remained just a scare crow. Firstly, this information is not made available to the voters to help them make informed choices. An NGO, Association for Democratic Reforms, has been making valiant efforts in the past to compile some of this pertinent information and disseminate it but that is almost like the tip of the proverbial iceberg of information that needs to be disseminated.

In a conclave of judges of the higher judiciary at Bhopal a few years ago, the then Chief Justice of India had reportedly asked the Chief Election Commissioner what action has ever been taken on such data and the reply was none. Just to reduce the shock it was added that the CEC had no resources to scrutinize the voluminous data available and they only look into complaints made by affected parties!

This time another new mandate has been issued. The candidates have to file their income tax returns for the last five years. Obviously sitting MPs contesting now may expose how much their wealth has grown in the last five years. But to what extent this info will be known to the public and how it will impact their choice remains to be seen.

Strictly speaking, there is no reason why the returning officers should not be made responsible for compiling and disseminating these information atleast one week before the date of polling.

While these are policy related shortcomings that need to be taken care of, there are plenty of defects and deficiencies in the implementing stage.

The updating of electoral rolls is a major area that needs attention. I remember my first effort to get my name registered in the electoral rolls almost 20 years back. I was bluntly told that the revision of electoral rolls will take place shortly before the next elections. Thereafter, just 10 days after I got my Voters I Card, when I went to cast my first vote my name was in the list of voters removed from the electoral roll! I did complain to the observer in situ itself and on his advice lodged a written complaint with the District Electoral Officer who was the District Collector himself. No marks for guessing what happened to that complaint. Worse, in one case some of those who were in my situation had actually approached the High Court claiming that their fundamental right as a citizen had been violated. But the court dismissed that petition with the remarks that even if those petitioners had voted it would not have affected the results.

The errors in the electoral rolls are also a matter of serious concern. I had had the opportunity to help out two candidates for the local body elections with the verification of the electoral rolls. From names to gender, age and address there was not one area where there were no serious errors. The simplest of examples would be of husbands being shown as female and wife as male. Non intimation of change of address is a problem of the voter’s creation.

Incidentally the inimitable Adhaar has not been linked to the Voters’ I Card and electoral roll.  Isn’t it time that this was done and remote voting enabled through electronic means? Well, that brings us also to another need-to network EVMs on constituency basis so that not only the results get updated in real time but also the confidentiality of booth wise preference of the electorate is protected.

As soon as elections were announced on 10 March, the Chief Electoral Officer lost no time in declaring that he meant business and the Model Code of Conduct would be enforced strictly. Brave words, indeed; but nothing new, for sure. What happens really on ground? Here are some facts disclosed under the RTI Act in the context of the General Elections 2014.

Among the information sought was

The details of cases of defacement acted upon by the teams*, in para 4**, since their deployment till two days prior to the date of providing information. The details should include the date, time, location, type/nature of defacement, party/candidate involved, action taken by the ADS(like movable boards removed and deposited at .(location where deposited); defacement of walls whitewashed etc; removing and whitewashing done by ......@ cost of Rs........; whether payment made or not, amount raised against party/candidate vide (document reference and date) sent by courier/regd post (regn number required) on (date), total distance covered, fuel consumed, nature of fuel.

*Anti Defacement Squads

**pertains to the area of Palakkad Municipality

Now the first response was that the information can be collected after inspecting the documents on a date that was almost a month away. The first appellate authority ruled that the delay is acceptable as everybody was busy with election work. He directed the information to be provided by 15 Jun 2014, that is after a further delay of 45 days. Accordingly some information was provided 12 Jun 2014. The first appeal filed after receveing this information was not accepted.

The most important bits of information provided are listed below.

There were 13 Anti Defacement Squads organised in the Lok Sabha Constituency, one each for the 12 Legislative Assembly Constituencies and one for the District Electoral Officer.

 Each squad consisted of a Junior Superindentent level public servant, as head of the squad, two subordinates, one videographer and a driver with vehicle.  The total diesel consumed between 17/3/14 to 29/3/14 alone was 3,747 liters. The squads had recorded cases of defacements under 5 headings- wall writing, posters, banners and others. Total number of such defacement of public property had been 149,333.

Interestingly, such cases in the matter of private property have not been recorded at all. Though the Model Code of Conduct states unambiguously that ’No political party or candidate shall permit its or his followers to make use of  any individual’s land, building, compound wall etc., without his permission for erecting flag-staffs, suspending banners, pasting notices, writing slogans etc.’

Also, though listed, absolutely no cases have been recorded in the matter of misuse of vehicle, violation of loudspeaker act, illegal meetings/speech etc, inducement/ gratification to electors /cash, kind distribution. This a far cry from the reality. At least one thing one can vouch for- there have been many violation of the loudspeaker act because many a vehicle could be seen plying making announcements though the permission, when given, strictly prohibits such announcements from moving vehicles.

The most interesting piece of information received was ‘Candidature cost of Anti Defacement’.  The figures are : UDF-110100, LDF-118000, BJP-42100, Welfare Party-1650, SDPI-2670, BSP-1142, AAP-1050, M P Virendra Kumar (Indep)-2100.  Though sought, the information about recovery of these amounts had not been provided.

Then there was this case of Mr Ramesh Krishna, IAS, assigned as observer to Kollam (Kerala) who went to Thiruvananthapuram to play golf (as reported in the media here). He was immediately withdrawn. But seeking information under the RTI Act on what disciplinary action had been taken against him the Public Information Officer of the CEC dismissed the media reports as ‘perception‘ and that no further action had been taken against him.

One doesn’t know how many people will be remembering those video reports of Ms Nalini Singh reporting of booth capturing during elections in Bihar and UP. Maybe those thuggish crimes have reduced, may not be entirely due to the efforts of the Election Commission or the public servants involved in conducting the elections. I will credit the social media and citizens journalists with a major share of the compliments for the visible positive changes. But there still is along way to go before we can usher in democracy through fair and free elections.

Before concluding, I must inform the readers here that I have registered a complaint with the Cheif Electoral Officer of the State (Kerala) about defacing the walls of private property by the UDF candidate, Mr V K Sreekandan, here. This is just a test case. It is more than 48 hours since I complained and demanded that the posters should be removed from the compound walls of the plot adjoining my house within 48 hours. The plot belongs to my children who are out of the state. A compensation of Rs 50,000/- has also been sought for trespassing into private property, as such defacement is to be viewed. Copy of the complaint has also been endorsed to the CEC.  Shall keep you posted of any furhter developments.

26 Mar 2019