Elections are a festival of democracy. It is an opportunity for our youngsters to engage with the system and make their voices heard. The mammoth task of conducting polls lies with the Election Commission of India (ECI). The importance of the EC can be gauged from the fact that the EC came into being on January 25, 1950, a day before India became a Republic.
Presently, the Election Commission is facing one of its toughest challenges thanks to the shenanigans of the TMC in West Bengal. A trailer of the TMC’s antics was seeing during the 2018 Panchayat Polls, when common citizens were denied the most basic right to vote. The bullying of TMC workers has terrorised the women and youth of West Bengal for years.
Fearing a certain defeat in the 2021 West Bengal elections, the TMC cadres have been repeating their tactics across West Bengal with full vigour. A large number of BJP Karyakartas have been killed by the TMC workers, even as their leader Mamata Banerjee did not utter a word. We all saw how mercilessly Shova Majumdar Ji was beaten up just because she belonged to a different ideology.
Have you ever heard a democratically elected Chief Minister ask cadres to attack central forces? Yes, only in West Bengal. In Cooch Behar, the TMC cadres indulged in a violent spectacle, not even bothering that the forces they attacked are the ones who protect our citizens from terrorists, jehadis, Maoists and other such threats.
Mamata Banerjee’s call to her party workers in Cooch Behar district to ‘gherao’ security personnel of Central forces is highly inflammatory, especially given Bengal’s history of poll violence. These personnel are in the state at the ECI’s behest to ensure a free and fair election and any attempt to instigate violence against them is an attack against sanctity of democracy itself.
Didi was already asked to explain her statement by the ECI. She has also been questioned by the ECI on her open call for minorities to not ‘let their votes get divided’. But she is going on from one toxic utterance to another undisturbed.
Thus, I have no hesitation in saying that the present is a moment of reckoning for the EC. It is fitting that they act and control the violent and anti-democratic impulses of the TMC including their topmost leadership. New precedents need to be set by the ECI when new lows are plumbed.
The current credibility and peace that the electoral process largely enjoys across the country is because of the ECI’s assertive actions over the last two or three decades.
Before Didi and TMC cry victim, I must remind her of some precedents in which the EC has taken strict action against leaders.
When Lalu Yadav’s much-feared ‘jungle raj’ tried to hijack the electoral process, TN Seshan postponed elections multiple times, earning the ire of Yadav who called him an agent of political opponents.
Politicians like Om Prakash Chautala and Bal Thackeray have been disenfranchised. ECI has got statues of chief ministers covered, embarrassed governors such as Gulsher Ahmed enough that they resigned, and even asked Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao to remove his union ministers Sitaram Kesri and Kalpanath Rai.
Prior to the 2014 elections, ECI had stopped Narendra Modi from holding a rally in Varanasi. Later, even after he became Prime Minister, ECI, in 2019, even invoked a rarely used article to stop the release of a film based on the life of Narendra Modi.
In April 2019, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, former chief minister Mayawati, then union minister Maneka Gandhi and Azam Khan, a former state cabinet minister had been stopped from campaigning by the ECI in Uttar Pradesh.
A number of people from the BJP, including a union minister, were barred temporarily from participating in campaigning at various times in later elections too.
It is fashionable nowadays to raise the false bogey of the importance of institutions and their credibility. Such talk can be expected if the ECI acts strongly against Mamata Banerjee, but that must not stop it from doing what it should to set a strong precedent.
Because everyone knows that such tendentious talk often originates from a particular section of the political and intellectual spectrum only when the results of the process of any institution go against their pre-conceived expectations.
The barometer for true commitment to institutions is to rise above one’s own predilections and stand by processes, no matter what the results are.
I find the TMC’s theatrics rather ironical because as recently as 2011, TMC was more than happy with EVM voting and multi-phased polls. When she was in the NDA, Mamata Banerjee left no opportunity to rush to PM Vajpayee demanding the dismissal of the CPM Government on the grounds of breakdown of law and order. What changed? It is the toxicity of power and the notion of invincibility, both of which will come crumbling down on the 2nd of May.
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