Why Indian democracy is in danger today

As the Election Commission’s press conference was underway on March 27, the BJP IT cell head and the Congress’ social media in-charge for Karnataka tweeted the poll dates for the Assembly elections some 20 minutes ahead of the official announcement. After the initial furore, it was clarified by both parties that they had sourced the information from a news channel. The news channel in question itself clarified that it had accessed the dates from "informed sources" and ruled out a leak as it got the counting date wrong. That seems to be the end of that.

What is worrying about the episode is that the Election Commission’s integrity has become a matter of an ongoing debate. Ever since the Election Commission under Achal Kumar Joti chose to break tradition by announcing Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat election dates 13 days apart, thereby giving an unfair advantage to the BJP, there have been murmurs from various quarters about the independence of central election watchdog.

What is even more worrying is that EC is not the only institution to come under a cloud in the recent time. In fact, even the media has been collectively stigmatised by a recent sting operation that exposed the proximity of a section with the establishment and the lack of ethics and self-regulation.

In January this year, four Collegium judges of the Supreme Court came out publicly to address the press on the high-handedness of Chief Justice Dipak Mishra as "master of the roster". It raised many discomforting questions about the bonhomie between the judiciary and the executive. In fact, when the four judges came forward to make their concerns public in January, it only served to buttress the contentions of some senior lawyers who had been alluding to it.

The Opposition parties are getting ready to initiate an impeachment motion against the Chief Justice in the Rajya Sabha and subsequently in the Lok Sabha. Though it might not fructify, the image of the judiciary as an impartial adjudicator is seriously imperilled by such events.

As for the legislature, the proceedings in Parliament in the last three weeks have revealed how the office of the speaker can be misused by the ruling party to serve its ends. For 12 days, the no-confidence motion moved by Opposition parties hasn’t been taken up citing “lack of order”.

This is rather astonishing as neither does such a precedent exist nor does the speaker have any powers to resort to such an excuse.

In fact, on March 27 and March 28, the only two days Parliament remained in session this week, the Opposition parties came up with a novel method to establish that they had the numbers to move the motion. With placards numbering from 1 to 80, Opposition members tried to make it easy for speaker Sumitra Mahajan to count heads - but to no avail.

Coming back to the Election Commission, when the former Gujarat chief secteraty-turned-chief election commissioner AK Joti chose to reason in October that the date for Gujarat election was being held back so that the remaining flood relief activities could be undertaken in seven districts of Gujarat, it convinced nobody and invited a huge backlash.

Even the widely respected former election commissioners SY Quraishi and TS Krishnamurthy chose to contradict the stand taken by the EC.

What made matters worse for the EC was the slew of election sops announced by the state government in that window, followed by back-to-back visits of the prime minister with election freebies. The ferry service between Gogha and Dahej, raising MSP on ground nut, relief to traders etc were part of announcements worth thousands of crores.

It almost seemed that the EC was midwifing a BJP win in Gujarat.

The perception that a constitutional authority like Election Commission was behaving like a government agency got further traction when the same AK Joti chose to disqualify 20 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs on the "office of profit" issue a day before demitting office. The Delhi High Court termed the call “bad in law” as the EC had not individually heard the version of the legislators, thereby “violating principles of natural justice”.

The manner in which the EC went about it a day before he was to step down, and how the president gave his assent the very next day, and how the media reported it, left many wondering about the fairness and non-partisanship of the different pillars of the democracy. And this is the backdrop in which EC came under fire when the election date for Karnataka began circulating in the social media before it was officially announced.

Finally, the fidelity of Electronic Voting machines (EVM) is another matter that needs to be established beyond doubt. Demands by Opposition parties to make the tallying of Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) with EVMs mandatory will have to be considered for people’s faith in the voting process to be restored. 

Otherwise, losing political parties will keep floating anti-EVM theories whenever vote margins come too close as the Gujarat elections demonstrated. In Gujarat, VVPATs in one polling booth from every constituency tallied with EVMs, but according to experts that is too small a sample size. A reform like full-scale tallying might require court intervention if not a legislation. 

What we can ill-afford as a country is for the public to lose faith in the system. It must be ensured that at least the third and fourth pillars of democracy, along with the Election Commission, are not just independent but also act independently - for democracy to sustain and flourish.