Clean sweep commissioner

I once went to T.N. Seshan, then the imperious chief election commissioner who had put the fear of electoral laws into politicians’ minds, to invite him to a seminar on ‘Whither Indian Democracy’. I had taken an appointment, and sent in my visiting card.

He called me in and said gruffly: “Indian Democracy? Nonsense!”

Taken aback, I mumbled, “Sir?”

“It should be Whither India’s Democracy.”

As I was leaving, he handed back my card, saying, “Do not waste your card; it will not be of use to me.”

He was wrong. After his retirement, he would write a weekly (May 17, 1998 - November 15, 1998) column in THE WEEK, though I do not claim to be the one who commissioned him.

What impressed me at that time was his eye for detail. He was checking the correctness of the title of a seminar that he would not inaugurate. This obsession with detail enabled Seshan to clean up India’s electoral politics. He looked into every detail of the election process, found the flaws and addressed them.

Seshan had come to lord over the electoral system with a good, but not remarkable, reputation as a civil servant. As environment secretary, he had clashed with his minister Bhajan Lal over a matter of exporting frog meat. As Rajiv Gandhi’s security adviser, he had sternly forbidden the prime minister from stopping his car and waving at a bunch of young Congressmen who had lined the side of Rajpath at a Republic Day parade. As cabinet secretary, he had fallen out with V.P. Singh and been packed off to the Planning Commission. Chandra Shekhar had picked him up from there, and seated him in the Nirvachan Sadan, expecting him to be useful and grateful.

Not Seshan. He rebuffed Shekhar by rejecting his pleas to postpone the polls in terror-hit Punjab, despite 40-odd candidates and campaigners having been killed. Then he surprised everyone by whimsically cancelling it hours before polling, under a new government.

By then he had begun his war on electoral dirt. He had ended the fear that villagers had about retribution from candidates whom they had not favoured. From booth-level tallies, candidates used to find out if an entire village had voted against them. In the 1991 polls, he ordered that ballots from all booths in a segment be emptied into a basket, shuffled with long sticks, and counted.

Next, he ended ballot box-stuffing by enforcing electronic voting machines on an electoral system that was still unready. He ended voter-faking by introducing the voter card, which would soon come to be known as ‘Seshan Card’. In 1993, he disqualified 1,488 candidates of the previous polls who had not submitted their election accounts.

Simultaneously, he enforced a code of conduct, though it did not (and still does not) have any statutory backing. He sent videographers to trail candidates, and record their speeches, meetings and rallies. He emboldened his officers to check VVIP cars, and even to cut the mikes if speeches crossed the stipulated campaign hours. He banned graffiti on public walls, and got campaign posters torn off government property. Seshan cleaned up, literally, the Indian—oops India’s—electoral scene.

All this was a startling awakening for the common man, who had been used to political thievery and electoral thuggery. He came to know of the majesty of yet another constitutional institution (after the Supreme Court, and the comptroller and auditor general) which was not afraid of the government. The middle class, sick of a political system that had become a cesspool (as an Angry Young Man who had strayed into it had said in disgust), came to worship him.

As Seshan rose in public, or middle class esteem, he also began to make mistakes. The first was to take Dhirubhai Ambani’s private jet to attend the Kanchi Sankaracharya’s funeral. When he was criticised for this, he said he had paid for the charter, and showed a photocopy of the cheque. Soon he turned abrasive in his remarks, arrogant in his attitude, megalomaniacal in his methods, narcissistic in his conduct (he even appeared in TV commercials and posed comically for magazine covers), demanding a status equal to a judge of the Supreme Court. To everyone who questioned him, he quoted the rules. His command over the rules was such that no one could talk back. The government complied by even amending the warrant of precedence and elevating his status. But Seshan wanted more.

The eye for detail would also be his undoing. His obsession with the rules made him blind to the laws and the Constitution. Or, as a jurist once told me, when Seshan quoted the rules, he ignored the law; when he quoted the law, he ignored the Constitution; when he quoted the Constitution, he quoted only Part XV that pertained to conduct of elections. He missed the larger constitutional scheme.

That became evident when he sought to poke his nose into the internal affairs of political parties who are beyond the purview of the commission when there is no election announced. He threatened to derecognise parties that had not conducted internal elections. The Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray called the bluff—he said his party’s constitution did not have a provision for electing its chief.

Politicians in Parliament sought to impeach him—the only manner in which judges and a CEC could be removed. But the wily P.V. Narasimha Rao talked them out of it, and found a cleverer way. He got the president to appoint two election commissioners, M.S. Gill and G.V.G. Krishnamurthy.

This brought out the worst in Seshan. Invoking the judge-like immunity that the CEC enjoyed under the Constitution, he refused to recognise them, barred their entry into the offices, and even called them “donkeys” in public. When he did allow them, he passed orders overruling them, and then went to the Supreme Court seeking to get them removed.

A Constitution bench of five judges headed by chief justice A.M. Ahmadi, and including two future chief justices (J.S. Verma and S.P. Bharucha), finally read the riot act of the Constitution to Seshan. In a landmark judgment, which would later become the foundation over which the entire electoral administration would function, they asked him to work with the two and accept their decision if he was in minority. They pulled him up for his abrasive statements and mocked at him for having acted in TV commercials. To his claim that he was at par with a judge of the Supreme Court, the bench told him not to entertain any such notions, and issued a stern warning to the government that any tampering with the status and majesty of constitutional authorities be first checked with the chief justice of India.

Seshan lost miserably. Even to the last paisa. The court ordered that if the CEC had used public funds to fight the case, the two election commissioners, too, could claim their litigation expenses from the same funds.

The next day, a few of us in the media called on him. He did not say a word, but gesticulated violently, and comically. The TV commercials disappeared overnight, and Seshan went off public gaze. He quietly left the commission when his time came.

But Seshan could not keep off the limelight. He contested the 1997 presidential election and lost by a huge margin to K.R. Narayanan; then he stood as the Congress candidate in Gandhinagar in the 1999 general elections against L.K. Advani and lost again. He moved to Chennai where he opened an academy for training politicians, gave lectures, and lived a largely private life.

The nation and the commission remember Seshan with awe and reverence. With all his flaws, he did a Herculean job of cleaning up the Augean stables of India’s electoral politics and deserves to be remembered with gratitude.