The task before the new Nirvachan Sadan chief

Sukumar Sen, the mathematician-bureaucrat who served as India’s first Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), persuaded even Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to delay the first general elections till all logistics and procedures were put in place. While in the mid-1990s, interventions by another CEC, TN Seshan, were seen by some critics as an overreach, it would be fair to ask whether Sen could foresee that in August 2017, one of his successors would write an article in a newspaper praising the Election Commission (EC) for merely doing its routine work.

In the second week of August last year, the EC received a rather strange piece of appreciation for doing something routine. The admirer was none else than its former Chief Election Commissioner SY Qureshi who ended his op-ed in The Indian Express with a paragraph applauding the poll body for resolutely ensuring fair play in a rather controversially fought election for a single Rajya Sabha seat in Gujarat.

Interestingly, a well-documented study two decades ago (A Cross-Sectional Analysis of National Electorate, Sage Publications, 1999) had ranked the EC as having the highest level of trust among public institutions in India. This high level of public confidence in the EC was reiterated in another study incorporated in State of Democracy in South Asia: A Report published by Oxford University Press, 2008.

Given how institutions have come under critical scrutiny in these times of intense electoral competition, Qureshi’s laudatory note was a sign of the challenging times that the EC would face in years to come. Besides the anxieties, tinged with bitterness, about procedural fairness, what’s added to its immediate agenda is elements like watching party finance structures, the eagerness shown by the executive for the idea of simultaneous polls, emergence of new factors like addressing scepticism over the working of EVMs (electronic voting machines), the impact of social media on electoral campaigns. The list goes on.

As the 23rd CEC, Sunil Arora, a 1980-batch IAS officer of Rajasthan cadre, will be well aware of this issues, especially given his tenure of over a year as election commissioner in the body. In a way, he would be in charge of one of the most important offices in India till April 2021, not least because he will direct and supervise the Lok Sabha polls of 2019.

Besides the crucial Lok Sabha elections, Arora’s tenure will also be responsible for assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand, NCT of Delhi, Bihar, Jammu & Kashmir, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. He takes charge of the EC at a time when the demands on the commission’s functioning are going beyond its role as an administrative body. Some of the challenges were outlined by his predecessor OP Rawat in a recent media interaction.

First, there is a long-pending need to review the entire legal framework of elections to take into account changes in electoral practices, polity, modes of campaign and nature of political parties since the enactment of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. The commission, as the last CEC stated, had set up a committee to review all the provisions (of the Act) and align them with the present ecosystem—social media, paid news, fake news, and abuse of money. These factors aren’t unique to India but are affecting elections worldwide. India needs a more contemporary regulatory frame to place the electoral exercises of, say, the next 20-30 years. The EC needs to draft its details for consideration by the law ministry.

Second, given the interest being shown by the current executive on the idea of holding simultaneous elections, the new CEC will have to do a more comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of it in his tenure. His predecessor had identified some aspects to be studied. India had simultaneous polls in 1952, 1957, 1962 and 1967. It was only after 1967 that state governments got dismissed, there were no-confidence motions and assemblies were dissolved. It implies that the idea isn’t new but going back to an election schedule which was disrupted five decades ago, because of the premature dissolution of state assemblies.

Bringing assemblies in sync needs amendments in five articles of the Constitution and some sections of the Representation of the People Act. After working out the legal details, the next question would be that of logistics: poll personnel, machines, companies of paramilitary, etc., will be required. The last CEC was of the view that it would take one year to put the logistics in place, though he was sceptical about its benefits vis-à-vis the immediate costs it would incur. He had argued that at present, the EC has one million polling stations and supply of only 17 lakh machines. In the event of simultaneous elections, the poll body would need 34 lakh machines—double of what’s available. Added to that are the costs of maintaining the inventory for five years without using them. All this would cut savings and escalate costs to result in a net loss. However, if a consensus emerges, the EC will have to look beyond the immediate repercussions.

Third, the general scepticism about public institutions in popular psyche has somehow meant that the seed of doubt sown by political parties regarding EVMs might result in a trust deficit among voters. The EC has been addressing this by launching campaigns on voter awareness in several public places. Such campaigns include sending EVMs and VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) machines across areas and asking people to come and vote. The matching of votes cast and the counting of slips are exercises in developing public trust and clearing misgivings about the process.

The EC’s open invitation to political parties to check EVMs only witnessed two parties turning up: the Nationalist Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The former CEC said even those two parties had merely come to learn about the machines, not to accept the CEC’s challenge to “hack” them. The poll body’s website has a status paper on EVMs answering all probable questions and doubts about the machine, including inquiry reports of incidents where EVMs were reported to have malfunctioned.

Despite this, the EC will need to persist with stronger public communication and response mechanisms to leave no room for conspiracy theories.

The issue of election finance regime, especially in the wake of election bonds, has to engage the attention of the new CEC for its repercussions on reining in the role of money power in elections. It’s not that the EC has been unconcerned about it, as is evident in what the former CEC OP Rawat told The Indian Express:

“When the election bonds were brought in through the Finance Bill of 2017, the EC raised its concerns with the Law Ministry. We said that it would result in more opacity in political funding and allow for loss-making companies to donate their money, because of the removal of the company law provision that allowed for only 7.5 per cent of the profit of the last three years to be donated. And, when you don’t know the source, anyone can give money. All the grey areas and concerns were flagged by the EC.”

Elaborating on the EC’s communication with the government on the issue, Rawat said: “At the time, we were told it was premature, as the scheme was not formulated and the implementation had not started. So the EC decided to wait. The scheme was notified on January 2, 2018. Now, contribution reports and audited accounts are being submitted by most parties, except for one or two. The EC has asked the Secretariat to work out whether the concerns raised in 2017 have been addressed. If yes, to what extent? And, if no, then what should we tell the government to do about it. We have been briefed about it to some extent, but more details are to be gathered and then they will bring the case to the EC again.”

Clearly, Sunil Arora will have to infuse the EC’s approach to the issue with a more rigorous scrutiny to ensure transparency in the financial conduct of political parties.

Like governments across the world, India is grappling with the impact of social media on polls. Talks between the Indian government and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have resulted in an assurance that their platforms will flag advertisements, names of sponsors, money paid for advertisements, and will see that their platforms don’t affect polls adversely. The assurance includes a 48-hour silence period before the completion of polls. However, the EC will need to have a more holistic approach to the uses and abuses of these powerful means of political communication. The setting up of the social media hub in the EC is a start that should be followed up.

In ensuring that the EC remains at the heart of navigating procedural democracy in the country, Sunil Arora has a number of challenges awaiting him and 29 eventful months to look forward to. At the cost of clichéd alliteration, “free, fair and fearless” electoral choices in the new decade needs the poll body to retain its place in public esteem.