EC SIR row: INDIA bloc gets ammunition, but Modi govt may brazen it out

Revelations made by The Indian Express on Wednesday (September 23) about long-brewing dissent within the Election Commission on the way the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was being given effect to has triggered a loud uproar by a united Opposition.

The exposé has reignited the Opposition’s demand for Gyanesh Kumar’s immediate removal as Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) while raising new questions on the bona fides of the SIR process thus far.

The Opposition’s renewed tirade includes demands ranging from scrapping of not just the SIR but even results for various assembly polls conducted in states where voter list revision had concluded, and the resignation and even arrest of Kumar. This, however, had little visible effect on the Centre and the CEC, who continue to remain defiant.

EC's rebuttal

Though the usually garrulous Kumar has taken refuge in silence, the EC has issued a hamhanded rebuttal of the Indian Express reports.

The EC’s statement does not deny any of the disagreements expressed in writing by Election Commissioners SS Sandhu and Vivek Joshi on at least 14 occasions over the past 10 months about various aspects of the SIR, including the arbitrary and seemingly illegal changes made to Form 6 under Kumar’s instructions.

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Yet, the poll panel claims that all its actions were “an outcome of the unanimous decisions of the full Commission in the past one year” — an assertion that Congress MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi and RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha, respectively, described as “nonsensical” and “nothing but hogwash”.

While the Centre is yet to respond officially to the raging row, sources in the government indicated to The Federal that no concessions will be made to the Opposition on any of its demands.

'False propaganda by Congress'

“The EC has already clarified that the views expressed by the two commissioners were part of a deliberative process and though all three of them (Kumar, Sandhu and Joshi) may not have always agreed, the final decision taken by the Commission was always unanimous," a senior member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet told The Federal. "Where is the question of dissent? The Congress party and its allies are spreading false propaganda as usual to discredit elections because they have lost.”

The Union minister added: “The EC is an independent constitutional body and actions of the election commissioners are protected under law; there is no question of the government getting involved in this in any way or of any action against the CEC.”

For the Opposition, however, the revelations come as a major shot in the arm. That the Centre and Kumar have been forced to relay clarifications to their favoured media outlets — either through unnamed sources or press statements issued by junior poll body officials — betrays the government’s discomfiture, even if the row, eventually, fails to take the Opposition’s demands to their logical end.

Burden of proof

The Opposition believes that with the Indian Express reproducing verbatim the written disagreements and objections expressed by the two poll commissioners against decisions taken by Kumar and the CEC not denying the existence of such correspondence, the “burden of disproving the allegations is now firmly on the poll panel chief and his political masters”.

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Some of the leaders across the Opposition’s INDIA bloc that The Federal spoke to were of the view that while the responsibility of disseminating details of the exposé among citizens and explaining the “manifest illegality and unconstitutionality” of the SIR is now theirs, the Indian Express reports have armed them with the smoking gun they, perhaps, lacked so far.

“The allegations haven’t come from any political party. A reputed newspaper has reproduced copies of letters and notes by two election commissioners expressing disagreement with what Gyanesh Kumar had been doing. It isn’t about conjecture, expressing doubts anymore… it is all in black and white," Pawan Khera, Rajya Sabha MP and the Congress’s media wing chief, told The Federal.

"Even though we had been raising the same concerns, it was easy for the government and Kumar to accuse us of doing politics but now not one but two election commissioners are saying the same things; it strengthens our claim that the BJP and the CEC have been stealing the elections through an SIR designed to put the Opposition at a disadvantage," Khera added.

We said so: Congress

The Congress party, which had spearheaded the INDIA bloc’s campaign against ‘vote chori’, says the revelations vindicate what Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi had been saying all along. Rahul today termed the allegedly vitiated SIR process (and its adverse impact on the sanctity of elections) an “act of treason” and warned the BJP and Kumar that justice will eventually be done.

Senior party MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who had led the legal charge against the SIR in several cases still under the Supreme Court’s adjudication, demanded that Kumar must “immediately resign if he has any shame”.

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Asserting that the Constitution as well as legal precedents set by various Supreme Court judgments held that the Chief Election Commissioner is merely the “first among equals” within the poll panel and doesn’t have any veto powers over the other two election commissioners, Singhvi said: “If two of the three commissioners are clearly disagreeing with the CEC on various aspects of the SIR, it shows that the decisions were not unanimous; what is even more disturbing is that not only was the majority view being repeatedly discarded by the CEC, the CEC had actually marginalized his own commissioners and, in doing so, hijacked the commission and we all know which political party this was meant to favour and who in the government was instructing the CEC.”

Calls for Kumar's arrest

Former Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress was voted out of power earlier this year following a hugely controversial SIR exercise in the state, too lost no time to slam Kumar and the BJP. She demanded Kumar’s “immediate arrest” and initiation of criminal proceedings against him while calling for restoration of the state’s pre-SIR voter rolls and conduct of fresh polls in each of the states where elections were held after revising the list of electors.

From Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to Mamata Banerjee to DMK supremo MK Stalin to even AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal, demands for Kumar’s immediate dismissal, a fresh campaign against the SIR and a renewed push for the impeachment motion moved by a united Opposition against the CEC back in April have come in swiftly.

Sources in the government say the immediate setback for the Modi regime may not be as much from the revelations against Kumar but the “possibly cascading effect” it may have on other political plans that the Centre may have had.

Optics politics

“Optics matter a lot in politics and this (controversy) is very damaging… we are not worried so much about what is being written about the SIR because there is no way that elections already held will be scrapped or that the whole SIR exercise itself will be scrapped, but the controversy damages us in other ways," another Union minister told The Federal.

"We are still in the process of getting numbers for important laws we want to pass, including the Delimitation Bill; there are other Constitution amendments also, but controversies like these will embolden the Opposition and parties who may have been amenable to backing us on some issues may not do so now if they think public perception is turning against us,” the minister added.

With Parliament’s monsoon session still to be prorogued despite its sine die adjournment on August 13, the Opposition, particularly the Congress party, had been repeatedly questioning whether the Centre was hatching a plan to push the contentious Delimitation Bill soon. If at all such a plan was in the works within the government, the Opposition believes the EC row will now force the Centre to defer it.

Centre in a spot

Ironically, the over month-long delay in proroguing the monsoon session, for whatever political calculations the government may have had in mind, has now put the Centre in a spot. Opposition leaders like Trinamool’s Derek O’Brien, Congress’s Jairam Ramesh and the CPM’s John Brittas say that since the session is yet to be prorogued, a sitting of Parliament must be “immediately convened” so that the unprecedented impeachment motion the Opposition had moved in April seeking Kumar’s removal as CEC can be taken up by the Rajya Sabha.

In a letter to President Droupadi Murmu, Brittas referred to the pendency of the impeachment motion moved by 73 Opposition MPs in Rajya Sabha on April 24 and urged that the “constitutional process contemplated under Article 324 (5) be allowed to proceed without obstruction and that the Government extend the cooperation necessary for Parliament to discharge its constitutional responsibility”.

Additionally, Singhvi told The Federal that a sitting of Parliament be convened immediately to initiate the impeachment proceedings against Kumar “if he doesn’t resign voluntarily” and demanded that “all letters and notes exchanged between the election commissioners, as mentioned in the news reports, should be tabled on the floor of Parliament so that there is complete transparency about what has been going on in a constitutional body that is supposed to ensure free and fair elections.”