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Former Union Revenue Secretary and transparency advocate E.A.S. Sarma joins Siddharth Varadarajan, The Wire’s founding editor, to discuss the functioning of the Election Commission of India. They address several questions, including:
- Why are the three election commissioners reluctant to act on Sarma’s documented complaints about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s violations of campaign laws?
- Why have they not responded to the coercive actions taken by the Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department against Opposition leaders, even though the model code of conduct is in force?
- Do we need a model code of conduct for election commissioners to ensure transparent and independent functioning?
- Does the problem lie in the fact that the government, i.e., the executive, dominates the selection process for picking election commissioners? The Supreme Court ruled that the ECI’s powers under Article 324 are vast and that it is up to the commissioners to treat their constitutional mandate as a ‘vast reservoir’ of power in exercise of their mandate of ensuring free and fair elections. Yet they are shying away from doing so.
