Opinion - News Analysis   

Election Commission must be a fair umpire

Harish Khare

Lalu Prasad's transgressions do not in any way justify the Election Commission departing from the obligations of a fair umpire.

THE ELECTION Commission has ordered the transfer of two senior Central Reserve Police Force officers, an Inspector-General of Police and a Deputy Inspector-General, after they had a meeting with Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad. This singular act has brought to focus a consistent and disturbing pattern. Has the Election Commission concluded that its primary responsibility in the current Assembly election is to ensure the defeat of Mr. Prasad and his party?

The two officers met the Union Minister at the direction of the Director-General of the CRPF. They have been penalised for obeying the orders of a superior officer. If anybody has to be indicted, it should be the DG of the CRPF. The CRPF chief is believed to have protested. The Election Commission cannot possibly be unaware that the CRPF is charged with the security of the Union Minister. The CRPF has been on this duty for six years (mostly during the National Democratic Alliance regime when he was adjudged to be in need of Z plus security) and it is normal for officers to periodically review the security arrangements. Mr. Prasad is believed to have complained informally to the CRPF chief of laxness in his security set-up, and the DG, in turn, had asked the two senior officers to meet Mr. Prasad to find out the exact nature of his complaint.

But given the intense and entrenched partisanship that consumes every institution in Bihar, this normal administrative meeting between Mr. Prasad and the two CRPF officers was depicted as a gross departure from the norms of a free and fair election. An already prejudiced Election Commission acted promptly to demonstrate its predilections.

Because Mr. Prasad has sullied his book so badly with the middle class, the Election Commission's actions have gone largely unnoticed and uncommented upon. The Patna-based media are fashionably anti-Lalu Prasad. The Commission's prejudices have been hailed as a much-needed dose of administrative neutrality.

What has gone largely unnoticed is that the pattern of transfers and postings of officers in the districts, down to the inspector level, betrays a bias against backward caste and Muslim officers. Forward caste officers have predominantly replaced them.

Those in the know of things in Patna can easily identify the Bhumihar officer who has become the Commission's informal adviser in this matter. In any other country, a legal NGO would have by now documented the Election Commission's prejudice, bordering on a constitutional discrimination.

The Election Commission is surely duty bound to ensure that impartial officers are posted for election duty; that brief now has been converted to see to it that officers hostile to this or that political party are in place in key election duty arrangements.

Again, Mr. Prasad's public image being what it is, there is no concern how one or two incumbents are able to distort the larger purpose of institutional autonomy.

By insisting on a six-week-long, four-phased election schedule the Commission has already brought the whole exercise into ridicule without in any way finding ways and means of correcting the aberrations. The Election Commission has set an unhappy precedent of institutional bias being passed off as technical correctness.

There is a lesson for political leaders like Mr. Prasad. In a way he is paying for all the excesses he and his brothers-in-law inflicted on the instruments of good governance. If the likes of Mr. Prasad believe that a political upper hand gives them a licence to misbehave with the bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy will return the favour as and when it can.

But Mr. Prasad's transgressions do not in any way justify the Election Commission departing from the obligations of a fair umpire. Unfortunately, there is no constitutional institution to play the third umpire.

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