New Delhi: At a time when the Election Commission’s conduct has come under severe criticism for being partisan to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a former Election Commissioner, Ashok Lavasa, has said that a system in which representatives get chosen without electors in the picture perhaps needs to be rethought.
In an opinion piece on The Hindu, Lavasa, whose time in the poll body was remarkable for a dissenting opinion he delivered in the ruling of complaints against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah during the 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign, draws attention to the Surat seat where a BJP candidate was elected without the seat going to the polls.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
“Is the Election Commission of India bound to call upon the constituency to elect a person again as it happens when, say, in government procurement there are unresponsive bids or no bids are received?” he asks.
The BJP’s candidate from the Surat parliamentary constituency has been elected unopposed, after the nomination of some candidates was rejected and some voluntarily withdrew their candidature.
Delving into the laws that have brought about the current system, Lavasa says that now a person who does not have “even a single vote would sit in Parliament to legislate on behalf of the entire constituency.”
Lavasa notes that the current electoral process is dichotomous and pre-supposes that the voter would choose one option irrespective of whether there is a conflicting demand on their vote.
“In an extreme situation, all the candidates in 543 parliamentary constituencies (even if they are 10,000 representing different political parties or independents) could game the system and deny a billion electors their statutory right by complying with the process but seriously wounding the spirit of democracy,” he adds.
Lavasa says that it is the voter who suffers when there is no contest. “Someone has to seek your vote for you to cast it.”
In such a situation, the system cannot favour contesting candidates, he says, simply to expedite the system.
“The will of the people is replaced by the expediency of the system in identifying who will represent the people who did not participate in the process. It is quite a paradox considering that democracy is defined as a “government of the people, by the people and for the people”,” he writes.
Lavasa argues for and against the Representation of People Act, the NOTA option and the merits of the first-past-the-post system.
Ultimately, he says, the system of walkovers must not be the norm and this needs wider debate.
