Trinamool Congress (TMC) boss and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee practically kicked off preparations for next year’s assembly elections with a line of attack that appears to be well thought out. Early this month, at a party conclave, she accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of manipulating the electoral rolls in West Bengal to bring in voters from other states. She and her party leaders have followed up by firing fresh salvos about such manipulation. The TMC brass has alleged that they have unearthed several cases in which voters in Bengal have Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) that bear the same number as those of voters in other states. We will come to the ECI’s defence in a bit. There are two angles to this allegation. First, there is a political one. After making this allegation, Banerjee constituted a committee headed by senior leaders of the party to take a fine-toothed comb to the election rolls down to the lowest level. She also used the occasion to question the appointment of Gyanesh Kumar as Chief Election Commissioner, highlighting his spell in the Union home ministry and proximity to Union Home Minister Amit Shah. All this is laying the ground for both pressuring the authorities to inspect the rolls and for countering the BJP’s standard election plank of accusing the TMC and the state government of bringing in Bangladeshi infiltrators and making them a dependable electoral constituency. It also lays the foundations for relaunching a campaign based on Bengali particularism and painting the BJP as a party of outsiders.
But while Banerjee’s medium- term objective seems to be calling the impartiality of government agencies into question, her immediate objective is to keep the pressure on the ECI. Whatever Banerjee may have to say, it is a tragic reality that, along with other supposedly watchdog agencies, the election commission has been badly undermined. In election after election, we have seen top BJP leaders, including, sadly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, get away with electioneering rhetoric that clearly infringes the Model Code of Conduct. The ECI habitually follows a policy of hearing, seeing and speaking no evil. But in this case the ECI has to come up with answers that satisfy this elementary problem of protocol raised. The ECI first said that while numbers have been duplicated, other details on the EPIC separate one card from the other – for instance, the constituency name, booth number, etc. This is hardly a defence. It has been pointed out that an incorrect series of numbers was used despite the existence of clear guidelines. The ECI has belatedly said it will fix the duplication problem. But that will not fix the damage done to the constitutional body.
