Modi's 2024 Lok Sabha win, despite BJP falling short, raises debate over election integrity and constitutional morality amid change in EC's appointment process
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s durability as leader, although questions were raised about the Lok Sabha elections of 2024, is now on a par with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, and Indira Gandhi, the third (excluding Gulzari Lal Nanda who was twice PM for 13 days to fill the breach).
All would make the history books. But Modi’s tenancy of the pivotal position would cast a long shadow on the moral fibre of the nation as woven into its constitutional credentials.
Bittersweet win
Indeed, Modi’s straight third Lok Sabha ‘win’, chalking up his eleventh consecutive year as PM, is likely to be bittersweet. In 1962, Nehru had come back for his third election on the trot as a leader with aplomb, with a greater win more than in the 1957 round. The current leader had hoped to equal this record, but fell badly short and this has a potential for in-house turbulence if conditions are unhelpful.
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The incumbent prime minister is in power because others helped him make up the numbers after his own party fell at the hurdle. It couldn’t reach the halfway mark and failed to win back its popular mandate.
But there is also another reason that is pivotal and has a crucial bearing on our democracy. It points to an ailing Indian State and has moral and constitutional bankruptcy stamped all over it if we survey the polling process these days.
The Election Commission of India was thus converted into a government outfit from being an independent constitutional authority whose role is vital in maintaining a democracy
Political taint
The 2024 results were debatable in 75 parliamentary seats in different parts of the country. Undue establishment pressure and influence were said to have tilted the balance. For the first time the role of the Election Commission of India came to be viewed with deep scepticism in regard to a Parliament election.
Political taint, therefore, attaches to the results in direct ways. This is significantly on account of the fact that the Modi government had changed the law to appoint the Chief Election Commissioner and the remaining Election Commissioners in December 2023, as the run-up to the Lok Sabha poll was about to commence.
The Chief Justice of India, who was the neutral element in the selection panel, was jettisoned under the changed law and his place was taken by a Union minister, giving the Modi regime a free run in choosing favourites to conduct and superintend elections to Parliament and the State Assemblies.
The Election Commission of India was thus converted into a government outfit from being an independent constitutional authority whose role is vital in maintaining a democracy, and the babu panel was now emboldened to play ducks and drakes with the established system as it kowtowed to the regime.
Mocking democracy
To this day the EC has not given answers to straightforward questions raised, and has resorted mischievously to rhetorical observations while redundantly laying out the procedures that are meant to guide the election process.
The opaqueness continues. In a signed newspaper article on June 6 detailing shenanigans of the poll body in the context of the Maharashtra state polls, the Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, also brush-stroked the larger picture. But EC’s silence reigns.
Political ‘answers’ from BJP leaders to questions put to the EC flood the airwaves. These amount to cocking a snook at the people of India. These mock not the BJP’s political opponents but democracy itself, in other words, the people.
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Media reporting, analyses and commentary on the theme preceded Rahul's article by a year but not a twig shook anywhere, which is also exactly what’s happened to the Congress leader’s fully argued write-up.
Congress to blame
The Congress party must bear the cross for this sorry state of affairs. It did not storm the Nirvachan Sadan in New Delhi, the Election Commission headquarters, with prolonged protest actions. It did not rally the people in the states, especially Haryana and Maharashtra where election distortions assumed disturbing forms.
It tweeted, held press conferences, made caustic comments, and then someone wrote a genteel article in the national press. But nothing was heard in the vastness of the land. Where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, who sees tweets, and who reads fine comments?
It is only when people are brought into action through democratic and popular means that they begin to understand how they are being short-changed by those in power, how their vote is being converted into nullity and into a state of meaninglessness. It is not very long ago that a leading Congress figure went on a very long march, and this lit up the national space as ordinary Indians flooded on to the streets with their woes. That lesson seems to have long been unlearnt.
What does this pusillanimity do? It condones the rise and rise of authoritarianism that mimics features of a one-man dictatorship, if not worse. It can be assumed a priori that the distortions in the poll process seen in Haryana and Maharashtra will be machine-tailored in Bihar later this year and a clutch of other states next year.
The Congress will then do well to blame itself, ask itself the questions that need to be asked about the country, and also about its own future.
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The system has turned so bloody-minded that it stops at nothing to win elections. In the Haryana state polls, skulduggery seemed the order of the day. Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered that the Election Commission produce all documents, including video recordings of the polling area. Seeing this, the government changed the law at the behest of the EC, prohibiting the people from accessing election data in all its variety.
The EC stood fully exposed. The government had conveniently changed a crucial law for the second time. It too stood exposed.
The subverting of the leading channels of democratic aspiration, i.e., the very institutions that make the system run, is to invite any demagogue populist to inscribe his name on the template that could lead to a variant of the road to fascism, this time with Indian characteristics.
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Regional parties cannot check this tendency. Their horizon is to cut deals at the state level and block rivals from taking charge locally. They talk big but think small. Their vision is stuck to a keyhole. And the lone all-India party to which the entrenchment of the ideological and political current in circulation should matter the most, appears to be cutting itself off from the people.
Carefully fabricated defeats in the forge of subverted institutions are intended to shear the popular legitimacy of the principal opposition party and lampoon it before its allies.
Loss of constitutional morality
After the Lok Sabha poll a year ago, the full-scale marauding of the poll process was on full view in state polls that followed within months in Haryana and Maharashtra. And there seems nothing on view that can stop the slide.
No equivalent maiming of a constitutional authority has been seen earlier, although the working of several leading institutions had been severely undermined and sought to be stymied over the past decade.
The Congress will then do well to blame itself, ask itself the questions that need to be asked about the country, and also about its own future.
The loss of constitutional morality that has ensued from the partisan tailoring of the Election Commission is arguably the single deepest black mark of these times. It militates against the very notion of democracy in India.
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Even when people win an election, they lose – and morale and political will ebbs away as resignation sets in as to the inevitability of the return of a certain ‘force’. This truly defines a formula for state capture in perpetuity.
The political situation was indeed tight last summer and the coin could have flipped either way, it was argued, if the Modi-led front and its principal opponents had won the 75 disputed seats in equal numbers on a fair evaluation or re-count to complete the Lok Sabha election process. But a handmaiden outfit conducting the poll was unseeing.
In fact, such was the atmosphere of disgruntlement in Uttar Pradesh that the PM came close to ceding his own Lok Sabha seat of Varanasi, about which much was said in UP’s bureaucratic and political circles at the time. In the days preceding the polling, the Union home minister – who takes no prisoners – had to make repeated trips to the holy city to ensure his master’s boat did not capsize.
This was the common refrain heard in Varanasi.
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Mood of despair
The news was far from satisfactory – as the present writer saw on a visit to the ‘timeless city’ in the election period. Even sections of upper-caste voters, a ruling party reservoir, appeared to be overcome by second thoughts and a string of doubts, surrendering to a mood of hopelessness – and this included activists of the RSS, the BJP’s mother ship.
Modi, eventually, won his seat but the mood of despair in his party – all too evident – at a meeting in the BJP’s precincts after the results were declared, appeared laden with foreboding, although the putative leader bragged – as is his wont – that he had equalled the record set by a previous Prime Minister (of winning three elections in a row). He is not given to mentioning Nehru in a positive reference and that’s become second nature for the man. But the faithful for once did not clap or shout out their endorsement.
The political question arose: Could he become PM again? Would the newly-elected BJP MPs elect him as their leader, when under his leadership they had crashed to 240 from 300 plus seats in Parliament, in spite of there being a self-serving, nominated, Election Commission? Suspense hung in the air.
In fact, such was the atmosphere of disgruntlement in Uttar Pradesh that the PM came close to ceding his own Lok Sabha seat of Varanasi, about which much was said in UP’s bureaucratic and political circles at the time
Under the norms of the Westminster system which have been followed from the first general election in India, BJP MPs should have been summoned to meet through an established process in order to elect their leader. This never happened.
Fearful that he might not make the cut, Modi and his lieutenants ensured that a meeting of the just elected party MPs did not take place. Instead, gauging that Nitish Kumar’s JD (U) and Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP were desperate to rush into government to be able to meet their respective state agendas, a meeting of NDA parties was hurriedly summoned by the ambitious coterie to make up support.
With this mobilisation in hand – and without ascertaining the wishes of BJP MPs – Modi went up to Rashtrapati Bhavan to stake his claim to form government. At that precise moment, another edifice of the Indian State fell.
The President asked no questions of the man who had led his party to defeat. She did not ask to see the resolution of the BJP Parliamentary Party electing him its leader.
To begin with, gargantuan efforts had been made to freeze the bank accounts of the principal Opposition party just before the Lok Sabha election in 2024 but the judiciary saved the day. Then questions hung over the legitimacy of the Election Commission and they still do. And to end the story the head of State failed to draw the line of constitutional propriety.(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal)
