Editor’s Note: The fall of the Election Commission

The watchdog must reclaim its autonomy and backbone to safeguard democracy’s “soft guardrails”.

It is not the act of voting that makes for a democracy but ensuring that the act is protected. | Photo Credit: Swapan Mahapatra/PTI

Newt Gingrich, the Republican politician from the US mostly credited with beginning the right-wing dominance of the House of Representatives, once told his partymen to stop using “Boy Scout words”. “You are fighting a war,” he said. “It is a war for power.”

Prime Minister Modi and his colleagues have embraced this dictum fully. For them, it is no longer an election but a full-blown war to retain power at any cost and by any means. Legality, ethicality, and even common decency have been jettisoned, replaced by outlandish lies, machinations, and hate speech. How did we get here?

The pre-2014 political establishment of New Delhi is often rightly described as effete, its privileged glasshouse existence having long lost touch with reality, but one thing it did actively employ was civility and the willingness to accommodate differences. This political culture of moderation is not the wimpish indulgence it is often dismissed as, but the very essence of democracy. Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call these unwritten norms the “soft guardrails” of democracy. Once these are slowly dismantled, it becomes much easier to reach and destroy the core.

We have seen a systematic degradation in political speech and culture over the past decade, initiated by the ruling party, mirrored by television anchors, amplified by WhatsApp groups, until it finally touched homes and families. One has seen the bar set lower and lower, until people are benumbed, their sense of shock and outrage slowly rendered ineffectual. Things that once “could not be said” are now openly shouted in election campaigns by none less than the Prime Minister. It would be a mistake to consider these as emotional outbursts; rather they mark the planned breaking of another barrier and then another, until the final act of annulling this or that section of the Constitution becomes imbued with a sense of inevitability.

Levitsky and Ziblatt have used political scientist Juan Linz’s work to come up with a set of four warning signs that indicate a democracy is being undone. First, politicians in power break written and unwritten democratic behavioural norms; second, they tolerate or encourage violence; third, attempts are made to deny the legitimacy of opponents; and fourth, there are attempts to curtail the liberties of opponents. We have seen instances of each one of these. 

If we look at the Election Commission alone, its progressive debilitation is blatant. First, the executive gave to itself the power to control the selection of the election commissioners. Then, the EC designed an election that stretched over 44 days. After two phases, the Prime Minister and his colleagues began to invoke religion openly in political campaigns, and the EC took no action. The EC then delayed the release of polling data, finally issuing some numbers but not the total number of votes polled. Now, the EC has delivered an astonishing harangue against the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge because he expressed concerns about its functioning, accusing Kharge of “attacking the very credibility” of the electoral process, but without one word to explain what the EC has done to restore its own credibility.

What will we say when we look back at this time? That we held elections regularly? So does North Korea. It is not the act of voting that makes for a democracy but ensuring that the act is protected, a task the Constitution entrusts with the EC, granting it enormous powers that free it fully from other arms of government. The only thing needed is a spine to use those powers. With the election at the halfway mark, it is still not too late for the EC to begin protecting the “soft guardrails” of democracy.