“Our main job is to neutralise the incumbent’s advantage,” said CEC Dr SY Quraishi, at Moneylife Foundation’s seminar “Democracy at Crossroads—Need for Electoral Reforms”
Alekh Angre
“The ruling party hates us (Election Commission). Our job is to neutralize incumbent’s (party) advantage. Neutrality is important as the entire election process is conducted by the bureaucracy, a professional body. Governments come and go but bureaucracy remains, said Dr SY Quraishi, India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC). He was speaking at a seminar titled “Democracy at Crossroads—Need for Electoral Reforms”, organised by Moneylife Foundation and V Citizens Action Network (VCAN).
Referring to the EC’s effort to neutralise the election process, Dr Quraishi said, “That’s why the ruling party hate us. But when they (ruling party) loose the elections, they start loving us.”
One of the ways the ruling party tilts the balance in its favour is by getting the government to release huge advertisements in the newspapers. Dr Quraishi suggested that, “the government-sponsored advertisements to be banned six months prior to polling. These advertisements are actually for the ruling party, and they drain the public exchequer.”
Another measure to neutralise the ruling party’s advantage is to “ban the transfer of the election-related officers six months before the election day. As the term of parliament/state assemblies are for a fixed tenure, political parties have a fair knowledge of the probable election dates. So they (political parties) start planting their trusted officers to interfere in the poll process. We do our own intelligence gathering along with monitoring certain officers. This becomes a task for us. We then remove some officers while keeping an eye on others. In the past we had removed chief secretaries, home secretaries, DGP (director general of police) from election duties. Not that we are happy doing it. But we strive on neutrality. If we have evidence that a chief secretary is attending a meeting of political party then we have to take action against him.”
He gave an interesting anecdote about one police officer working at a behest of a political party. “Many political parties had complained against a particular officer from Tamil Nadu, acting as an intermediary between the parties. He also used to order every SP (Superintendent of Police). Normally we don’t touch officers dealing in security and intelligence. But since there were complaints we had to address the issue. We asked this officer to go West Bengal as an observer. However, he refused citing that he has inputs that LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) has a ploy to kill some of the top politicians and to create disturbance. However, we smelt a rat and cross-checked the details with the home secretary, who refuted them and also said that the officer no longer belonged to a particular wing. Further we told the officer that any if disruption was created during the poll days, he would alone be responsible for it. Instantly he asked for leave to go abroad. And he actually went.”