Congress’s plan to undercut the EC is dangerous — and needs to be promptly abandoned
When a Congress spokesperson talked of the need to give statutory status to the model code of conduct in the middle of the row sparked by Salman Khurshid’s defiance of the Election Commission’s directive during the UP campaign, it appeared to be a diversionary ploy at best and a crude threat at worst. The latter may have been closer to the truth. As a report in this paper today reveals, a proposal to take the model code of conduct out of the EC’s purview and place it in the realm of the law and the court is on the agenda of a Pranab Mukherjee-headed Group of Ministers scheduled to meet this week. The Congress is being both authoritarian and unwise. By seeking to cut down the EC’s powers after its law minister defied it — although he did send a subsequent apology — the party confirms that the show of grace was purely superficial. Lurking below the surface was the same hauteur and cavalier approach to institutions that the party has been accused of in the past, often deservedly. In the process of settling scores with the EC, the Congress could end up not just downsizing a crucial institution but also undercutting the system’s efficacy to correct electoral impropriety.
The EC’s credibility has been hard won. Nudged by the flamboyant T.N. Seshan, it transformed itself from a sleepy institution to an energetic watchdog that has raced ahead of all institutions in terms of the popular trust vested in it. The model code of conduct — and there are elements of it that this newspaper has often questioned — may not be statutory but it has a sanction more compelling than that. In the best of democratic traditions, it is observed because of the respect for the unwritten rules of the game, the line drawn by mutually acknowledged convention, a pact between parties and voters with the EC cast in the role of neutral umpire. Writing this code into the lawbook would needlessly undo this exemplary compact. It would also mean that the corrective that can now be swiftly imposed by the EC within the course of the campaign will be delayed. Given our over-burdened courts, violations of the electoral code of conduct may go unchecked indefinitely.
Surely the Congress has plenty on its plate. The fallout of several corruption scams is still to be fully dealt with. Every time it takes a big policy initiative, there is the pull and tug of allies. Confrontation is brewing between the government it leads at the Centre and non-Congress ruled states. The Congress can do without taking on an institution that it can only pull down at its own — and the system’s — peril. It should abandon any such plan.
