More elections more opaque

NEW DELHI: The BJP-led Centre has scored another goal against the people through a sly amendment of the rules of disclosure regarding elections. In a gazette notification on December 20, it smuggled five words, “as specified in these rules”, into the Conduct of Election Rules to impart further opacity to the voting process in our country.

Pre-amendment, Rule 93(2)(a) of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, mandated that “all other papers relating to the election shall be open to public inspection”. This empowered anyone to see any document, video recording, or CCTV footage from any voting station in the country. Now the rule says, “all other papers as specified in these rules relating to the election shall be open to public inspection.”

This effectively means the Election Commission of India (ECI) will not have to disclose to the public all documents and material relating to voting proceedings but only those specified in the Conduct of Election Rules. The change was notified after consultations with the ECI, which, as a referee who plays for the ruling party, did not demur.

The spur for this furtive manoeuvre came from a directive by the Punjab and Haryana HC that, if complied with, would have led to a public scrutiny of ECI’s questionable conduct of the Haryana Assembly polls. The court ordered the commission to furnish to a petitioner all material including video recordings, CCTV footage and documents relating to voting at a polling station during the elections held in October. This would have allowed the public to see documents such as Form 17C recording the voter turnout as certified by the presiding officer of a polling station. This latest coverup fits into the pattern of anti-democratic behaviour by both government and election referee, which has made India’s elections progressively less transparent. Several civil society groups and political parties have repeatedly expressed concerns over ECI’s partisan conduct, which runs the whole gamut of the voting process. In every election since 2017, it has shown blatant favouritism towards the BJP, allowing its star campaigners to break every point in the Model Code of Conduct. It has stubbornly refused to integrate the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail mechanism into its counting process to make it kosher. Its stance on electoral bonds, initially opposing it and then supporting it when the BJP’s skulduggery came out into the open, has seriously eroded its credibility. There have been widespread allegations regarding the malfunctioning and tampering of EVMs, which the commission does not even deign to acknowledge.

Having become a willing handmaiden to the Centre's designs, the panel’s modus operandi has been to ignore or stonewall all queries and formal petitions. It steadfastly evades all questions about the magical materialisation of lakhs of twilight-hour voters in states won by the BJP but not in those lost by it. Asked to explain specific voting discrepancies, it publishes obtuse and generic FAQs purporting to self-certify the transparency of elections.

It responds, however, to social media memes, affecting injured innocence. In his extraordinary press conference one day before the general election vote count back in June, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar objected to being described as a ‘laapata gentleman’. The conduct of India’s election is a model to the world, he claimed, lamenting that “people remember the flowers; no one remembers the gardener.” Given the current drift of our democracy, we’ll be lucky to have a garden at all.