Editorial: Of demagogues, and democracy

For a nation that claims to be the ‘mother of democracy’, we have become squeamish about any dissent on that proposition. Taking the cue from the BJP-led dispensation at the Centre, citizen-facing institutions, public as well as private, are going to a ludicrous extent to hush naysayers. Two episodes this month show that our confidence in being a democracy is tremulous at best.

A young teacher of law was sacked last week by the edtech company Unacademy for merely urging his class—at the end of a lecture on the Centre’s tactics of giving new names to old laws in the name of cleaning up colonial cobwebs—to “vote for an educated person in the next election”. It’s a telling commentary on the health of our democracy that citizens’ innocuous statements leave the empire shaking like a leaf.

Then there has been the forced departure of an economics professor of Ashoka University after he wrote a research paper that raised questions about the Election Commission’s conduct of the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Prof Sabyasachi Das’s statistical analysis of returns from that election indicated there was significant scrubbing of Muslim names from the electoral rolls in closely contested constituencies. Counting irregularities also took place in polling booths under the watch of observers appointed by the Election Commission. Further, these irregularities were more glaring wherever officers from BJP-ruled states were deputed.

If the EC were a fair cop, it would have invited Prof Das for a consultation and a closer look at his data. Even if these irregularities were not big enough to alter the true verdict of the people, they were a corruption of the process by which we elect our representatives, the process that gives us the right to call ourselves a democracy.

But we don’t live in such a democracy anymore. Instances of the commission reneging on its sacred duty are now legion, ranging from small departures from norms to major ones. The ruling party routinely gets a pass on stealth canvassing, (barely) disguised expenditure, adherence to rules on hate speech, and so on. But now depredations into our democracy are becoming systemic, not for the gain of one seat or two, or one election or two, but to cage it forever.

The Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment) Bill, surreptitiously introduced in the Rajya Sabha earlier this month, threatens to change the system of appointment of election commissioners such that its autonomy is neutered and made subservient to the Executive. The selection committee of three will have the PM and the Leader of the Opposition as before, but with the inclusion of a Cabinet Minister (nominated by the PM), not the Chief Justice of India nor any other person of eminence. This move is analogous to the longstanding effort of the Centre to end the collegium system of appointment of judges to give a decisive say to the executive. The letter written by a group of 89 former civil servants to the EC urging it to maintain the sanctity of the electoral process has not come a day sooner. Calling themselves the Constitutional Conduct Group, the signatories urge the EC to act as the impartial referee it was meant to be by the makers of our Constitution.

Significant actions needed are an early hearing in the Supreme Court on the electoral bonds case; a dialogue with parties on disqualifying defector MPs/ MLAs for six years; making hate speech a criterion for disqualification during poll campaign; and robust cross-verification of EVM counts with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).