V. Ramani's web I AM, THEREFORE I THINK

I have witnessed, conducted and supervised Lok Sabha (LS), legislative assembly and municipal corporation elections over the past fifty years. Who can forget the 1977 LS elections, which unseated the Congress party for the first time after independence? The 1989 LS elections, which ejected the Congress from power a second time. The 1991 LS election, which witnessed the unfortunate spectacle of the assassination of a former Prime Minister. And the 2004 and 2014 LS elections, which ushered the incumbent governments out of power. But my vote for the most unusual election would undoubtedly be the 2024 LS elections.

The present election has been characterised by twists and turns never seen before in the annals of India’s election history. The precursor to the drama was the Supreme Court judgment of 15 February 2024 holding the issue of electoral bonds to be unconstitutional. After much huffing and puffing, the State Bank of India disgorged information on who gave how much money and who got the money (the two being pieced together by intrepid media and civil society investigators). Next, before the announcement of elections, came the unexpected resignation of Election Commissioner Arun Goel. With the resignation of former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa still fresh in people’s minds, the rumour mills started working overtime. The rushed through appointment of two new Election Commissioners, probably to meet the deadline of announcement of Lok Sabha elections, attracted criticism, especially since new legislation negated an earlier Supreme Court decision and gave the Government of India a decisive say in appointment of the top honchos of the ECI.

The third Act in the ongoing drama featured the arrests of Arvind Kejriwal and K. Kavitha in the Delhi liquor policy case after the declaration of LS elections and the enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). Taken in conjunction with the previous incarceration of former Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren and the over year-long custody of former Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, the March-April arrests effectively prevented a number of opposition politicians from campaigning. There was also the sudden enthusiasm of the Income Tax Department to freeze the accounts of the Congress and some other opposition parties for apparent tax infractions: how these came up for action only at election time is a crore-rupee question.

As if there had not been enough drama already, the top guns of the BJP added more masala to the khichdi. Led by no less a person than the Prime Minister, the ruling party campaigners made mutton, machli, mangalsutra, mujra, Mandir and Muslim their key points of reference, not to forget manifesto (the Congress’s, of course). The resulting furore saw some backtracking from the Prime Minister, who affirmed his resolve not “to do Hindu-Muslim”. The problem here lies in the public perception that acts of his party’s governments in various states, whether of commission (anti-beef laws, religious conversion statutes, dress codes, bulldozer raj) or omission (blithely ignoring hate speech, giving latitude to vigilante groups taking the law into their own hands), have deepened already existing fissures between the two largest religious communities in India. The least one would have expected from responsible public figures would have been a focus on issues like jobs, health care and education rather than diatribes on appeasement of “minority groups” and an almost obsessive focus on India’s largest minority community.

But what raised many eyebrows, especially of veteran politicians and administrators of electoral battles of the past, was the ostrich-like attitude of the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the strict enforcement of the MCC. For probably the first time, notices were issued by the ECI to the two major political parties for violations of the Model Code of Conduct by their star campaigners, rather than questioning these campaigners in person. After cogitating on the issue for 23 days, by which time the bulk of campaigning had already been completed, the ECI delivered a homily to the two national parties on how their members, especially senior leaders, should maintain norms in their utterances. Such pusillanimity in firmly enforcing the MCC led to an atmosphere of impunity, with unsubstantiated charges and slurs continuing to be hurled, without discipline being enforced on the major speakers, including the Prime Minister. Little wonder then that the mild-mannered former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, has, at the fag end of the election season,  seen fit to strongly admonish his successor.

The MCC in respect of the media causes even more concern. The partisan electronic media has made its party affiliations clear even earlier, these continuing in the election season. Inordinate time space was given to interviews with ruling party functionaries and news attention was lavished on election meetings and roadshows of BJP bigwigs, especially the Prime Minister. What is more troubling is the gross misuse of social media to mislead the public and influence voting patterns. Reports show how major platforms like Meta and Google have been used by third-party advertisers to post communal and derogatory messages to the population: there is no provision for regulation of such content in the MCC. WhatsApp groups are subject to no MCC and can transmit messages (including incendiary ones) round the clock. The ECI clearly needs to confront the use (and abuse) of technology in elections in the coming months and years.

The ECI was fortunate in being let off the hook in the Supreme Court cases of both the EVM-VVPAT and the timely publication of constituency-wise total voting figures. It has steadfastly refused to engage over the past five years with experts from civil society organisations to resolve the issue of the number of VVPAT slips that ought to be counted to reassure the public that EVMs are accurately recording votes as actually cast. Instead of following sound statistical sampling methods, the ECI has stuck to the 2019 Supreme Court formula of counting slips from 5 VVPATs in each assembly constituency, without specifying what would be the next step in the event of a discrepancy between the EVM and VVPAT count. During the current elections, the ECI took an inordinately long time in releasing the votes polled in each parliamentary constituency; when it did make this information public, it gave percentages rather than actual numbers. This led to the unusual situation of parties approaching the Supreme Court to direct the ECI to furnish constituency-wise numbers of votes polled. After affirming before the court that it was not required to publish figures of constituency-wise polling figures (based on Form 17C), the ECI, in a sudden volte face, provided constituency-wise polling figures for each constituency the first six  rounds of polling. Its sudden, prompt ability to produce figures it had said would take time to collate hardly boosted the credibility of the ECI, already under the civil society scanner for its approach to the EVM-VVPAT issue. Matters were not helped by its public outburst against the Congress party for drawing attention of its allies to the issue of votes polled.

Sideshows also seemed to feature in this stranger than life election season. The grandson of a prominent Karnataka politician facing allegations of rape (said grandson also being a candidate in these elections) has raised the political temperature as has the alleged assault on an Aam Aadmi Party lady Rajya Sabha member on the premises of the Chief Minister’s residence in Delhi.

This topsy-turvy six-week long searing, bruising, bitter election campaign (strongly reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland) will cease by the end of May, but its echoes will reverberate well into the tenure of the next government. Doomsday prophets are already wondering what the outcome will be in the event of a hung Parliament. While I do not subscribe to extreme theories, I do wonder what the future holds in the event, belying exit poll predictions, the BJP falls short of the half-way mark or has just a narrow majority. Given the developments in recent times in states ranging from Arunachal Pradesh to Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra, I would not be surprised if elected Lok Sabha members seek to make Faustian bargains motivated by daam and dand (saam and bhed having been rendered virtually irrelevant). If you don’t believe me, just trace the party-hopping in these elections, which would have made a Page 3 socialite proud. Truly, the just concluded IPL (Indian Premier League) may then make way for the higher stakes IPoL (Indian Political League). Should this happen, we can only write the epitaph of constitutional morality and moan the debasement of constitutional democracy echoing Cicero’s lament: O Tempora! O Mores!