New Delhi: A few days back, the Chief Election Commissioner of India, N.Gopalaswamy, indicated the poll body’s readiness for early Lok Sabha election. In the normal course, the term of the present Lok Sabha expires in May 2009. Elections must be held in time to constitute the new Lok Sabha. So, the next Lok Sabha poll can be expected in May next unless the ruling Congress led United Progressive Alliance government decides to seek a fresh mandate much earlier.
The Congress may not like to take the risk whatever be its troubles with its new ‘saviour’ the Samajwadi party. It will like to wait till prices come down through better supply side management. This will be possible only after the Rabi crop comes in. towards the year end. Such sequencing pushes the Grand Old Party (GOP) tryst with a fresh vote to early February at the earliest.Election commission officials have been silent about the prospects of early LS polls. Barring a stray remark of the CEC, there has been no hint of Nirvachan Sadan’s state of preparedness. But the talk of likelihood of Lok Sabha elections in November refuses to fade away. For valid reasons.
Six states – J&K, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, and Mizoram are due to elect their new assemblies in November. The poll body is working to complete by this month (August) end the task of revising the voters’ list in accordance with exercise carried out by the Delimitation Commission headed by ‘green judge’ Justice Kuldip Singh. Nirvachan Sadan is also busy preparing the maps of the re-drawn Lok Sabha constituencies. Once these twin tasks are completed, just one month’s notice is enough to conduct Lok Sabha election. So, if the notification is issued in September-October, the Lok Sabha polls can be held in November.
It may be recalled that the chief election commissioner had conducted and completed the Himachal Pradesh assembly polls three months before their schedule. The state cabinet did not recommend dissolution of the Himachal assembly under Article 174. In fact, it was opposed to the EC plan. The then chief minister, Veerbhadra Singh had pointed out that the state assembly had a fixed term of five years under Article 172 of the Constitution and cutting short its life was against the constitution.
CEC Gopalaswamy had brushed aside his arguments. Firstly he asserted that his decision was valid under the constitution and that logistics had prompted him to pre-pone the HP polls. The legal eagles in the Congress demurred. And went along with the EC plan. Why they did not test the EC powers remains a mute question.
Karnataka is the second state where the Election Commission can be said to have had its way with the ballot. Initially, it spoke of conducting elections eight months after the delimited constituency profiles were ready. That much time, it said, was needed to ready the voters’ lists for the new constituencies. Yet, the Karnataka elections were held three months after the delimitation exercise was over. The Janata Dal (S), Samajwadi Party, Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party had opposed early polls in Karnataka.
If the Centre had wanted to stall the election, it could have extended the president’s rule in the state, which was imposed after the fall off the second BJP-JD(S) coalition government. It did not. The only possible inference is that the Congress was also game for early elections though experts contend that the EC by ordering early elections had violated the spirit of the constitution in Karnataka. Just as was the case in Himachal.
A school of thought in Delhi’s political circuit is that CEC Gopalaswamy will be tempted to test his logic at the altar of Lok Sabha as well. These analysts believe that he will advance the Lok Sabha elections to November to coincide with the elections for six assemblies. There is the Himachal precedent to follow. The six-assembly affair is a mini-general election and as such the nation cannot afford to have two massive electoral exercises within a span of six months. Constitutional pundits are divided. Some experts like G.V.G. Krishnamurthy, who is a former Election Commissioner, argue that constitutionally the term of the Lok Sabha cannot be tampered with.
Article 83(2) of the constitution gives a five-year term for the Lok Sabha. This period is computed from the first session of the House. Lok Sabha can be dissolved by the President only on the recommendation of the cabinet. So if the EC orders elections in November that will be against known practices.
Till TN Seshan happened, the general belief was that the Prime Minister of the day decides the poll timing. Under Seshan, EC rewrote the ground rules and decreed that while the government calls for elections, it is the poll body which will determine the dates for balloting. GVG himself was a party to the EC decision to refuse to go along with Prime Minister Narashimha Rao’s plan for elections in Kashmir.
Election commission is a three–member constitutional body. The Supreme Court has held (in a case in which GVG was pitted against Seshan) that all three election commissioners enjoy equal powers. So much so, if CEC Gopalaswamy wants to hold a November election, his wish will depend very much on the mood of election commissioners, Naveen Chawla and S.Y.Qureshi. But in many important decisions in the past, Qureshi is said to have sided with Gopalaswamy. So, if the CEC gets the support of Qureshi on the question of early LS polls, Chawla will be in minority and he can have his way.
Conventional wisdom tell that the Bharatiya Janata Party will be the gainer of early polls, provided of course, Mayawati and her third front allies fail to put their act together. Any how, BJP has reaped the benefits of ‘advancing elections’ in Karnataka and Himachal.
Gopalaswamy has about eight months left of his tenure. In other words, he would have demitted by the time elections become due in normal course for the Lok Sabha in May 2009, Navin Chawla would have moved into the driver’s seat by virtue of his seniority.
Delimitation has changed the character of 209 parliamentary constituencies. This has affected the traditional turf of many top leaders of the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Lok Janshakti Party, Dravid Munnetra Kazhgam, Samajwadi Party, and even Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. The constituencies of many UPA stalwarts have become reserved while some Dalit and tribal leaders of the Congress find their constituencies converted into general category. At least some 100 members of the 14th Lok Sabha have to search for new constituencies.
BJP leaders say that their party also has been adversely affected by delimitation. But their Prime Minister in waiting L K Advani is comfortably placed. After delimitation, Gandhinagar has become ‘more safe’ for him. It is said that the Muslim-dominated areas of his Parliamentary constituency have been shifted to other constituencies.
Gopalaswamy was part of the delimitation commission. He was appointed (when he was Election Commissioner) to the panel by Brij Bihari Tandon, the then CEC, in 2005. Upon his elevation to the post of CEC in June 2006, Gopalaswamy should have quit the delimitation body and appointed another senior poll official in his place, as convention demanded. This he did not do, according to some sources, who aver that during the illness of Justice Kuldip Singh he had even presided over the meetings of the commission.
Surprisingly, political parties, the Congress in particular, did not raise any objections. Senor Congress leaders accept that it was a mistake not to have objected to Gopalaswamy’s association with the delimitation commission. Politics is not collecting IOUs alone. It is an art of looking for talking points. By this yardstick, the Congress has lost some brownie points. Whatever be its failings, the BJP is a well-oiled machinery, always on the look out for issues, late Rajesh Pilot told me once.
Consider the way the BJP has been targeting Naveen Chawla after he was made an election commissioner. The party’s charge was (is) that Chawla is a family friend of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Another charge was that some trusts run by the Chawlas received monetary assistance from the MP local area development fund. The Congress could have picked on Gopalaswamy. He was the Home Secretary, when L K Advani presided over North Block. More over he was from Gujarat cadre of the IAS. Was it a ‘failure’ on the part of Congress? Or did the Congress not see anything amiss in the Gopalaswamy appointment?
When Chawla issue was kicked up by the BJP, B. B. Tandon was the chief election commissioner. He said he was not competent to take any action against Chawla. But Gopalaswamy had a different take. He had said on record that he would act on any complaint against Chawla after receiving it from Rashtrapati Bhavan.However, jurists like GVG Krishnamurthy are not amused. “All the three members of the election commission are equals. How can a CEC act against an EC’, they ask. Those appointed to constitutional posts can be removed only through impeachment route.
Admittedly, several questions come upfront in the event of date with November for LS polls. Is the election commission acting in consonance with the constitutional provisions? Are the superannuated bureaucrats at the helm of Nirvachan Sadan wrecking the democratic system after reducing elections to a half-baked reality show?
Yes, the CEC Gopalaswamy has got away with no knuckles in the case of Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka. If he repeats his activism in the case of Lok Sabha also, as some analysts believe he will, India will be face to face with a constitutional crisis that even the Seshan benchmarks have not made us visualize. Needless to say, there will be political parties to hail the EC move. As there will be parties to condemn the poll body. Which way the wind will blow?
We will know soon.
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