India: Election commissioners under lens
Impartiality in polls comes under spotlight when retired or serving bureaucrats are appointed by the ruling party
Afive-bench judge of India’s Supreme Court has said in oral observations that there needs to be a neutral body to appoint election commissioners. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has three — the senior most being the chief election commissioner (CEC). They work through consensus and consultation.
While the ECI is a powerful body by virtue of Constitutional autonomy, its impartiality in the election process comes under spotlight when the election commissioners are retired or serving bureaucrats appointed by the ruling party. In court, the government has argued that there have been no issues with the ECI to warrant going into how the commissioners are appointed. Some would say that there have been issues from time to time, but that is not the point. It is a matter of principle.
Among the problems the Supreme Court has pointed out in its deliberations is that the CEC is not getting a good tenure, given the retirement age of 65. The last time any CEC was appointed with over three years to go was in 1996.
How firebrand Seshan made a difference
T.N. Seshan, the firebrand CEC, had a good six years from 1990 to 1996. Seshan was able to bring about Supreme Court-backed reforms to the election body that are serving us well till this day. It is thanks to Seshan that human discretion in the election process has been minimised, reducing the scope for manipulation.
Seshan introduced photo identity cards to address false voting, and a model code of conduct with strict enforcement to reduce the role of money in the election process. Today we need another Seshan because we have a number of issues the ECI has not been pressing hard about. These include the false deletion of voters from voter lists, the theft of voter data, vote privacy issues caused by the release of booth-wise data, the use of fake news, the no-limit spends by political parties, and so on.
Justice KM Joseph said that it would be a good idea to have the Chief Justice of India on the appointment committee. He remarked that the CJI’s very presence will send a message of neutrality. Some editorials have rightly pointed out that the CJI is a member of the appointment committee of the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Stronger than a collegium
We therefore need an even stronger system of the appointment of the election commissioners.
For example, it would be a good idea to carve out a small new service called the election service within the Union Public Service Commission. Since the Election Commission has Constitutional autonomy, these women and men will never feel answerable to changing governments, only to the election commission and the courts. This would be a similar system to the one we have for the audit services.