There is some merit in the Congress party’s criticism of the government’s move to amend the manner in which the Chief Election Commissioner of India and Election Commissioners are appointed. But if the history of governance in the past three decades is to guide us, it does not lie in the mouth of this party to offer such criticism. For Jairam Ramesh to cite a letter written by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Lal Krishna Advani to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in support of a bipartisan scheme to appoint the CEC and Election Commissioners is a tad hypocritical. If the Congress saw merit in the suggestion, what stopped it from putting such a scheme in place when it was in power; after all, Mr. Ramesh was a minister in Dr. Singh’s government when Mr. Advani wrote in 2012. The other argument made by critics of the government’s move is that the suggestion to have a bipartisan panel to choose individuals who conduct national and state elections had come as far back in 1990, when the Dinesh Goswami committee had recommended it.
In the 33 years since that recommendation was made, the Congress and the BJP were in power for almost equal durations. Neither party saw fit to dust the cobwebs off the Goswami report ~ perhaps the most honest effort to consider electoral reforms in independent India ~ and to implement its recommendations. On the contrary, the history of the Election Commission of India tells us that the effort preponderantly has been for the government of the day to choose officers it feels it can control when push comes to shove. That it sometimes failed to do may have had more to do with the individuals it chose than with the process deployed for their selection. Why, for instance, would governments have abandoned the eminently sensible practice of choosing individuals of legal and constitutional eminence to the post of CEC, and instead picked a series of officers from the Indian Administrative Service and even the Revenue service? Six of the first nine Chief Election Commissioners of India ~ KVK Sundaram, SP Sen Varma, Dr Nagendra Singh, S L Shakdhar, R V S Peri Sastri and V S Rama Devi ~ were acknowledged legal and constitutional experts… and then followed the deluge of civil servants. When the Supreme Court put in place a selection panel comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India to pick Election Commissioners, it did so with the rider that the direction would stay until the government brought in legislation.
To that extent, and if the intention is to be technical, the government is right in asserting that by bringing in legislation, it is only doing what the apex court had asked it to do. But by creating a mechanism that will nullify the role of the Leader of the Opposition, it has not served the cause of bipartisanship. In its defense, the government will argue that none of its predecessors did so either.