The voting in the second phase of election to the West Bengal Assembly on Wednesday will mark itself as one of the darkest moments in India’s electoral history as it keeps out a large number of people from the process for no fault of theirs. The episode becomes all the more unpardonable as it happened on the watch of the Supreme Court of India and the Election Commission of India, institutions created to protect the constitutional, fundamental and democratic rights of the people.
The electoral roll for West Bengal had 7.66 crore names before the EC went into the special intensive revision (SIR) in November last year. The process has legitimacy in that it seeks to clean up the voter lists, the fundamental document for the conduct of elections, by ensuring that the names of all and only eligible voters appear in it. The EC published the first draft roll on December 16 with 7.08 crore voters; the final roll published on February 28 this year had 6.44 crore names. The final list left out about 60 lakh people for “logical discrepancies”. This number was brought down to 27.10 lakh after the mammoth work done by the EC with active help of the Supreme Court that drafted in the officers of the subordinate judiciary in West Bengal and neighbouring states to do some of it. The appellate tribunals have until now cleared less than 2,000 of the more than 27 lakh appeals pending before it for inclusion in the voters’ list.
In short, more than 27 lakh people who make up about four per cent of the total electorate in the state will have no right to vote in this election for the Election Commission failed to complete a task it had taken upon itself. The EC is the constitutionally mandated body to conduct elections to both Houses of Parliament as well as the state legislative assemblies on the principle of adult suffrage. It has been vested with extensive powers to ensure the sanctity of the process, which also includes the preparation of the electoral rolls.
The Election Commission has failed itself, the people of West Bengal, the Constitution and the very idea of electoral democracy by not ensuring that every single eligible voter was part of the democratic process to elect the government in the state. Those at the helm of the EC have forfeited their right to continue in office when lakhs of citizens were made to watch helplessly as a government is being formed in their state with no mandate from them. A small swing in the vote percentage can be decisive in an Indian election; and four per cent is an unacceptably high figure.
In a larger sense, the Constitution is an article of faith between the State and the citizen about some of the solemn rights the latter would enjoy. They may be fundamental rights or constitutional rights; but they are inviolable. The Supreme Court of India is mandated to step in if and when the State uses its might to trample on those rights, be they belong even to a single person. Unfortunately, the apex court has also failed to discharge its duties by being silent when large numbers of people were kept out of the democratic process.
The Indian people and Parliament will have to look into these very serious lapses on the part of the constitutional bodies in upsetting the foundational principles of this country sooner or later. The earlier they do it, the better for Indian democracy.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
