Former civil servants accuse ECI of bias in conduct of Lok Sabha election

A group of retired civil servants backed by seasoned academics and retired military personnel has expressed what had hitherto been confined to middle-class drawing room discussions. The group has accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of glaring bias in the recent Lok Sabha election and alleged that it was “one of the least free and fair elections that the country has had in the past three decades”.

A letter signed by 64 former civil servants and over 80 academics and veteran army personnel, stated, “So blatant have been the acts of omission and commission by the Election Commission of India that even former Election Commissioners and CECs have been compelled, albeit reluctantly, to question the decisions of their successors in office.”

The letter accused the ECI of ignoring a series of hate speeches, primarily by Bharatiya Janata Party candidates. Short of accusing the ECI of being a sitting duck, the letter charged it with “blithely” ignoring the “hate speeches and communally loaded statements by candidates, primarily of the BJP” by saying that it “had no power to take action”.

The signatories, who have come together as a collective called Constitutional Conduct Group, include  former civil servants S.P. Ambrose,  Mohinderpal Aulakh, G. Balachandran, Vappala Balachandran, Gopalan Balagopal, Chandrashekhar Balakrishnan, Jawhar Sircar, Parveen Talha, P.S.S. Thomas, Pradip Bhattacharya, Wajahat Habibullah, Sajjad Hassan, Arun Kumar and Subodh Lal; well-respected academics like Nivedita Menon, Sumit Sarkar, Ira Bhaskar, Dilip Simeon, Ayesha Kidwai and Nandita Narain; and armed forces veterans like Admiral L. Ramdas, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Lt Gen M.A. Zaki and Major Gen T.K. Kaul.

They rued that the ECI did not even send  a show-cause notice to Prime Minister Narendra Modi though he repeatedly misused the Pulwama and Balakot incidents to garner political mileage by whipping up “nationalistic, or more correctly, jingoistic fervour and channel it in favour of the BJP”.

They also said the suspension of the IAS officer Mohammed Mohsin who dared to check the Prime Minister’s helicopter “for any non-permissible cargo” was a fit case of “ECI’s bias”. Interestingly, the civil servants also wrote about the much-talked about Namo TV, which was clothed in mystery during the elections. The channel “strangely operated without obtaining permission from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry to go on air” and neither had it “complied with the many regulations necessary to start a new channel”.

The group also drew attention to people complaining that their names were missing from the electoral rolls though they had cast their vote in the past. “Several reports were published in the media of large-scale voter exclusion, with some reports suggesting that voters from a certain minority group were the most affected. It was incumbent upon the ECI to investigate them and respond promptly”. Significantly, the group also drew attention to the erosion of the people’s faith in electronic voting machines. “People’s confidence in EVMs would have been greater if the ECI had been more cooperative about using the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) in a manner that would confirm the results of the EVMs, but from the beginning the ECI was reluctant to match the number of votes recorded in EVMs with the votes in the VVPAT machines.”  Also, “between the last day of polling and the counting day, there were several reports of unexplained movement of EVMs to and from the strong rooms in various States. These movements have not been satisfactorily explained, and the ECI’s bland denial does not inspire trust or confidence.”