DC Edit | Electoral Reforms Merit More Attention In Parl

The Parliament is meant to offer a platform for debating issues that need the attention of the government of the day and give policy directions to the executive. The discussion on two important topics, the national song and electoral reforms at the start of the Winter Session, however, beg the question as to whether these were indeed fruitful.

For instance, the Opposition may have won the debate on the national song, but to what end? It has only served to expose, and to some extent legitimise, the ruling party’s deep animosity towards the past leaders of the Indian National Congress.

As for the debate on electoral reforms, it only led to the old blame game. The government, as expected, justified the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across India, while the Opposition criticised the weakening the Election Commission of India as well as its alleged misuse by the government as a tool to hijack the popular mandate.

Union home minister Amit Shah, who led the charge or the ruling party, made the political point that the Opposition parties are objecting to the legitimate exercise fearing the deletion of names of illegal immigrants and subsequent loss in elections. He also pointed out the duplicity of the Congress opposing the use of the electronic voting machine whenever it loses the election. Mr Shah indeed has a point to which the Congress has yet to come up with a comprehensive rebuttal.

Mr Shah, however, made the Freudian slip of saying that the SIR is aimed at keeping illegal immigrants out of India’s democratic system and that the NDA government will continue with its “detect, delete and deport” policy against them. The SIR in fact has, or ought to have, a larger purpose of regularising the rolls, viz., removal of the names of dead voters, elimination of multiple voter IDs and addressing of the issue of large numbers of migrant electors, and it has been clarified by the Supreme Court while hearing the petitions on SIR that the Election Commission has no mandate to decide who is a citizen and who is not. But if Mr Shah has his way, then all those who fail to find their names on the voters’ list will face the threat of deportation. Mixing up the process of electoral roll revision with an exercise to detect illegal immigrants is not a bona fide action; it actually gives credence to the Opposition charge that the far-from-transparent SIR is indeed a plan to introduce a National Register of Citizens by another means.

Mr Shah also defended the government’s introduction of the law keeping the Chief Justice of India out of the panel to select the Chief Election Commissioner citing the practice during the Congress governments wherein the government of the day consulted no one while making that choice. And it is a fact that the earlier CECs were an exclusive choice of the government. But that hardly explains what difference made by the present arrangement, where a panel of the Prime Minister, his Cabinet colleague and the Leader of the Opposition recommends the name to the President for the appointment of a person as CEC. Moreover, why does the new law take away the equivalence of the ECs with the CEC by giving the CEC the power to remove them? This is a further, and more damaging, assault on the independence of the institution.

And, too, Mr Gandhi has been pointing out instances of vote theft but they went unanswered, first by the EC, and now by the Treasury benches in Parliament.

Thus, while the BJP is justified in pointing fingers at the excesses of the Congress governments of the past, it should not limit its contribution to merely an exercise in whataboutery. Both the ruling party and the Opposition should acknowledge their mistakes and look for ways to clean up and strengthen the electoral process. In fact, the issue of electoral reform calls for much greater attention than that bestowed on it in Parliament by the two sides.