In a startling attack on the occasion of National Voters Day (January 25), Rajasthan Governor Margaret Alva accused the Election Commission of converting the festival of democracy – elections – into a virtual condolence meeting. As the occasion coincided with the eve of Republic Day, the Governor’s speech went largely unnoticed due to the explosive address by President Pranab Mukherjee, which grabbed the attention of the media and the entire political spectrum.
However, given her close proximity to the Congress president, political observers feel that the Governor might be expressing the party’s anxiety at the growing strictness of the election watch-dog in monitoring campaigns and the movement of money during elections. In some Assembly elections last year, the Election Commission conducted raids and seized huge amounts of currency in some places; since no party dared to claim the funds, much less explain them, it is difficult to assess the impact of these seizures on the election outcome there. Suffice it to say that the heightened pro-active role of the Commission has caused heart-burning in some quarters.
As no active politician can dare to criticize the Election Commission, it was left to party loyalist Margaret Alva to (mis)use the Governor’s office to question the Election Commission’s increasing severity towards political parties and candidates during polls. The context of her outburst can only be the forthcoming Lok Sabha election. Alva accused the Election Commission of framing “unrealistic rules” that make campaigning almost impossible. She asserted that these days candidates are forced to spend half their (campaigning) time in the offices of finance managers and district magistrates to tabulate their election expenditure in the minutest details, and candidates are under severe strain about adhering to the prescribed expense limits. The demands to account for “every penny spent” made life difficult, she said.
Giving an example, the Governor said that once a candidate complained to her that a particular candidate purchased T-shirts from a wholesale market in Tamil Nadu at a cost of Rs 8 per piece. But the Election Commission insisted on counting the expense at the rate of Rs 40 per piece, and the candidate was helpless in the matter. Insisting that inflation was at times not as high as the Commission believed, Margaret Alva said there were also too many restrictions in the matter of erecting or pasting election posters and banners. She said that when she was in active politics, she always had disagreements with the Commission.
The Governor’s observations are startling because the Congress has dominated the UPA coalitions successively for 10 years, and controlled all critical appointments in the country, particularly to the Election Commission. Hence, the party’s extreme discomfort with the Election Commission, expressed through the Rajasthan Governor, is tantamount to an admission that it faces the “precipice” in the forthcoming parliamentary election. It is notable that no other political party has so far expressed accord or discord with the Election Commission.
President Pranab Mukherjee the same evening dubbed the 2014 election as a “precipice moment in our history”, a testing time when the nation could either go over the brink to disaster, or hold on and avoid the abyss and return to the road to prosperity. In a speech widely perceived as repudiating the Congress strategy of welding post-election alliances, the President warned that if the 16th general election did not yield a stable Government, the outcome could be “catastrophic”. He called upon each voter to realise his/her personal responsibility and not let the nation down. Pointing out that the “promise of India has sometimes been mislaid by misfortune”, the President appealed, “Destiny has given us another opportunity to recover what we have lost; we will have no one to blame but ourselves if we falter”.
An unnoticed aspect of the President’s speech was a veiled disapproval of the tendency to bifurcate States for electoral gains, a clear allusion to the festering crisis over Telengana, which has been a major, blotched, initiative of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Noting that “Passions are rising over whether we should have smaller states to extend equitable development to all parts of a state”, he opined that the “politics of divide and rule has extracted a heavy price on our subcontinent”.
Clearly distancing himself from the ruling dispensation at the Centre, the President said a new Government would be in office before he next addressed the nation on the eve of Independence Day, and “whosoever wins must have an undiluted commitment to stability, honesty, and the development of India”. As the country’s First Citizen called for 2014 to be the year of India’s resurgence, it was obvious that he had literally set a cat among the pigeons.
Niticentral.com, 27 January 2014
