EC doesn’t take things easy

We should be grateful to this institution for the due diligence it brings to the conduct of elections

The Election Commission has received more than its share of brickbats in the conduct of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Mulayam Singh Yadav, fighting a very tough political battle, has publicly targeted it by claiming that the EC is “not even ready to listen to us”. Then the BJP, when forced to be on the back foot over its inflammatory CD, started targeting the Commission, especially Navin Chawla.

A few facts may be mentioned to substantiate the argument that the EC has been extremely vigilant in UP. First, the elections for the state’s 403 seats will be held over seven phases for a full month — continuing up to May 8. The message is clear: an extremely abnormal political situation demands a surgical response. N. Gopalaswamy, CEC, himself stated on March 25 that the UP elections constitute a ‘mammoth task’.

The Commission has found it necessary to deploy central paramilitary forces in each and every polling booth. It has also undertaken a large-scale pre-election cleansing of the bureaucracy beginning with the replacement of the chief secretary and the director general of police on March 16. The allegation against the former chief secretary was that he had attended SP party programmes and had sung paeans in praise of the chief minister. Could the Commission have trusted the sense of neutrality, impartiality and sense of fairness of such an officer? Other senior officers, too, were given the marching orders. Further, the full three-member commission visited UP on March 28 to inspect the election arrangements and special observers were appointed “to ensure effective coordination for free and fair elections in the state”.

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So why has the EC taken these steps? The fact is that criminalisation of politics has become an integral part of UP’s political culture. An official record of the criminal background of UP legislators reveals that 41 MLAs of the Samajwadi Party, 21 of the BSP, 19 of the BJP, three of the RLD, 2 of the Congress and 7 independents are “legislators with criminal records”. Booth capturing by the musclemen of politicians with criminal background has become the order of the day, with the local bureaucracy hand in glove with the offending candidates.

Mulayam Singh has ‘Yadavised’ the police force, the fear is that the BJP is attempting to polarise voters along religious lines through communal propaganda. Therefore, on the issue of the controversial CD, the Commission has stood firm, provoking the BJP to directly attack the credibility of the Commission.

How can free, fair and fearless elections be held in UP if senior officials are at the beck and call of politicians and politician-turned criminals? How can free, fair and fearless elections be conducted if a political party is allowed to spread communal hatred as part of its electoral campaign? India is fortunate that it has an Election Commission that is extremely vigilant; otherwise elections, as a democratic process, would have been rendered a farce.