The blatant and brazen partisanship that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has displayed in the past few years warranted serious suspicions. It sank to a new low with its handling of Meenakshi Natarajan’s case last week. The nomination papers of Natarajan, Congress in-charge for Telangana and former Rajya Sabha member, for the Upper House for one of the three seats in Madhya Pradesh were rejected on the grounds that she had failed to disclose information of a case against her in Hyderabad in her election affidavit. Natarajan was one of the respondents—respondent number 4—in a private complaint by a former Telugu Desam Party corporator. There was no criminal FIR against her, let alone charges made out or a chargesheet filed; the local magistrate’s court had served summons which Natarajan had responded to.
The ECI’s arbitrariness and bias become clear as daylight when, in hindsight, the dots of this sordid episode are joined. A day after the Returning Officer rejected her nomination papers, on June 12, Natarajan approached the Supreme Court for relief. The apex court held that it had no jurisdiction to interfere in an ongoing election process, citing Article 329(b) of the Constitution, and recommended that an election petition, to be filed after the RS election, was the only remedy. Meanwhile, on the same day, the ECI declared that three BJP candidates were elected unopposed from Madhya Pradesh. Later that day, the magistrate’s court in Hyderabad returned the private complaint. Did Natarajan err in not disclosing this complaint? Hardly so, going by the strict demands of the law.
The private complaint did not name her as the key respondent; there was no FIR against her, and Section 33A of the Representation of the People Act requires disclosure of only those cases in which charges have been framed and which carry a punishment of more than two years. Moreover, the law requires the RO to point out errors to a candidate and allow rectification; this was not needed in Natarajan’s case, but even this basic procedure was skipped. Was it deliberate? Every step of the ECI leads to the uncomfortable truth—it ensured that the opposition candidate didn’t stand a chance.
The ECI’s primary mandate is to conduct free and fair elections, from the galli to the august Houses in Delhi, but from assembly elections in various states in the recent past to the Rajya Sabha election, the ECI’s conduct leaves many trails of suspicion because of its bias against the Opposition. This is a dangerous and slippery slope for India’s democracy—and a far cry, indeed, from the times when TN Seshan-headed ECI made it politically unbending and uncompromising. Natarajan’s case completely exposed the ECI. It must rediscover its lost spine, sooner rather than later.
