An election marked by intense heat & hate

SO, it is all over. Or, just not as yet. The marathon is over; the march to the podium remains. The race has left everyone, including the spectators, tired.

There are three ways to express our exhaustion: a sense of triumph as we complete yet another gigantic democratic exercise involving 970 million electors with a decent voter turnout and women continuing to play a lead role; a sigh of relief that an unprecedented phase of torrid toxicity unleashed by those that ought to be role models is over; a sense of nervous anticipation on the part of the pretenders to the Treasury Benches of the new Parliament.

The question before the nation, however, is whether we can expect a more participative democracy where public interest issues are debated with positivity and without the obsession to knock the other side down. Will those elected treat matdaan as people’s vote donated (daan) to them for which they owe nothing to the people in return or as an expression of popular will (mat) accompanied by high expectations?

After the dust and din has settled, what is it that the past 12 weeks following the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on March 16 will remind us of? Will we be left remembering Mark Antony’s words: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones”? Or, is there hope that the new dispensation will deal with the pressing problems the nation faces?

This election will go down as one of unmitigated heat and undisguised hate, both unprecedented. High temperatures and frayed tempers reminded one of Jawaharlal Nehru’s words: “Elections were an essential and inseparable part of the democratic process… Yet, often enough, elections brought out the evil side of man… Was democracy to be a close preserve of those possessing thick skins and loud voices and accommodating consciences?”

That is a question that even the electoral process conscience keeper, the ECI, found too hot to handle. People, too, were bothered by the question: Was it necessary to endure so much heat (and hate) to exercise the right to vote?

However, what the ECI should seriously ponder over is whether it was possible to curtail the duration of this vital exercise. The delayed initial announcement, the seven phases (almost as long as Shakespeare’s ‘The Seven Ages of Man’), the long gaps between some phases, the helpless obsession with the Central police forces. No wonder, star campaigners ended up having hoarse throats, party spokespersons making predictable pontifications, pollsters inventing ingenious phraseology to avoid making forecasts falling foul of the ECI but unable to resist the temptation, YouTubers running out of new bottles for old wines and the entire nation glued to a suspense thriller that might turn out to be disappointing because their ‘primary suspect’ didn’t turn out to be ‘the man’.

Then there were enough twists and turns. The electoral bond verdict before the elections declared the more than Rs 16,000 crore that went to the political parties’ coffers as ‘unconstitutional’. But that didn’t prevent its use to woo voters for earning the mandate to govern the state. Talk of ends and means. Then came the EVM/VVPAT verdict, dashing the hopes of those who expected an outcome that could help allay their apprehensions of manipulation of the machines.

The court also refused to step into the domain of the EC in people’s quest of elementary voter turnout data contained in Form 17C. Eventually, in a bathetic turn of events, the hitherto reluctant ECI divulged the data that it was accused of hiding with ‘motiveless malignity’.

Many felt this was the most ‘issueless’ election, with no political party anchoring its campaign on a dominant issue. Instead, parties clutched to every straw that their tried-and-tested themes of religion and reservation threw up. People wondered if party manifestos were a formality overtaken by an increasingly vicious war of words. The rusted and blunted swords were out and though they couldn’t kill, they were enough to cause infectious wounds. The din became louder and competitively more offensive. At times, even violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), no stone was left unturned in challenging the patience of the ECI, which found itself under pressure to show teeth. A cavity had already been created before the elections over the controversial law of appointment of the election commissioners. The abrupt departure of a serving election commissioner, leading to the hasty appointment of two election commissioners under a law challenged in vain in the SC sharpened the debate over the poll body’s impartiality.

The SC cannot be expected to intervene in every move required to strengthen the citizens’ trust in the ECI. The commission needs to do that itself through a regular and sincere dialogue with the stakeholders, finding optimum solutions to allay their doubts instead of heightening their fears. The perceived alienation between the election body and civil society organisations is a sad development, especially if the ECI wants to remain in the forefront of leading the effort at electoral reforms.

One of the principal electoral reforms facing the new government is evolving a transparent mechanism for the funding of political parties and the need to prescribe a limit on spending by political parties during elections. The ECI, on its part, must address the need to remodel the MCC, which nearly cracked during these elections. It is evident that the chief criterion for assessing the neutrality of the ECI is its willingness and ability to firmly enforce the MCC. Besides, the MCC needs an overhaul through a consultative process, with consequences of violations and operating procedures embedded and all complaints and their status posted on the website for full public disclosure. In addition, making political parties responsible for the conduct of their star campaigners and candidates should be formalised without diluting the accountability of the individuals. If political parties can be arraigned as accused in cases under the PMLA and companies prosecuted under the Companies Act, why can’t the parties take responsibility for the utterances of their campaigners?

While the successful conduct of elections is another feather in the nation’s cap, public discourse and conduct employed for winning votes is something that no right-minded Indian can be proud of. The political leadership must realise that “words are like arrows; once shot, they cannot be called back.” Francis Bacon had warned: “It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it that doth the hurt.”

Time to cleanse our thought.