Sunil Arora faces unfounded flak from Julio Ribeiro; confronts with rectitude.
New Delhi: The 2021 elections have not merely seen cliff-hangers at the hustings. The institution of the Election Commission (EC) has been subjected to unprecedented flak. The authority which since 1950 has conducted successful polls, ensuring change of regimes when the mandate so merited, suddenly has come under scrutiny and a pall of doubt hangs over its credibility. Oversight by courts of the land is healthy intervention which ensures that the values of India’s vibrant, functional, democracy sustain. The incursion in 2021 is also extra-judicial. We live in a post-truth age, in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from detail and repeated assertion of talking points for which factual rebuttals are ignored. Objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and public belief. It has been largely propagated since 2019 that EC’s sanctity has been violated. Doubts are raised on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and VVPAT (voter verifiable paper audit trail). EC in 2018 had offered political parties to prove the fallibility of EVMs and VVPAT—except rhetoric, no party came forward with empirical proof of the allegations. Accusation and innuendo persist.
The decision to hold eight-phase poll in West Bengal’s 294 seats while single-day polling was held for 234 seats in Tamil Nadu sharpened the discourse. The violence witnessed in West Bengal during and in the aftermath of the polling perhaps justifies the cautious decision, which, according to Trinamool Congress’ belief, was accentuated by the comfort-level of Centre’s ruling party and the antagonist in West Bengal, BJP. The successful holding of state elections during Covid times in Bihar in November 2020 notwithstanding, the integrity of EC was called into question—on 26 February 2021 Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee wrote to the then Chief Election Commissioner, Sunil Arora, calling into question the virtue of EVMs and VVPAT. Trinamool accepted with humility the verdict of 213 seats its romped home on 2 May. But in the same breath the fair-play of the Returning Officer of Nandigram, the high voltage seat where Banerjee failed to get elected by a whisker, conceding the seat to her one-time confidant-turned-bête noire, Suvendu Adhikari of BJP. On 2 May, EC announced that the results vindicate the infallibility of the system and justified the enhanced security detail which had ensured fearless voting thanks to the confidence building measures initiated by the commission. As for the Returning Officer of Nandigram, he now lives in fear, protected by security provided by the state. He had turned down the demand for recount made by Trinamool—as per Rule 63 of Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, a returning officer upon receiving a recount request can allow it in whole or in part or may reject it if it appears to him frivolous or unreasonable. Once election process is over, the aggrieved party has recourse to an election petition, which usually is before the High Court. On 2 May, Trinamool said it will approach the Supreme Court against the Returning Officer’s decision. No appeal has been proffered since.
Sunil Arora, a 1980 batch Rajasthan cadre IAS officer, who had held important positions in his cadre state and served as Union Information & Broadcasting Secretary and headed the nascent Skill Development Department at the Centre prior to retirement in April 2016, had been reemployed as DG of newly formed Indian Institute of Company Affairs, an oversight body for ensuring fair corporate governance, before being inducted as an Election Commissioner in August 2017 and elevated as the 23rd Chief Election Commissioner in December 2018. He demitted office on 12 April 2021 while state elections were on. Controversy had dogged his appointment in 2018: it was alleged that his Haryana cadre batchmate, Ashok Lavasa, had been bypassed as he had raised certain points on the conduct of powers-that-be and dissented in the three-member EC. The very essence of having a multi-member body is that majority determines decision making process—dissent is inbuilt into the discourse. By some coincidence, while Lavasa raised the red flag and his dissent came into public realm, Income Tax Department put the businesses of his family members under scrutiny—nothing untoward emerged; the cases were ultimately closed. Lavasa meanwhile chose to scout for a plum job at Manila’s Asian Development Bank and quit the EC, paving the way for Arora to become CEC on the eve of the 2019 Lok Sabha poll. This was seen as a largesse to an officer who had served BJP regimes in Rajasthan and had been a trusted aide of the BJP stalwart, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the towering Chief Minister of Rajasthan, of 1977 vintage. Arora had been entrusted crucial chores in Rajasthan during the tenures of BJP Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and Congress regimes of Harideo Joshi and Ashok Gehlot.
Controversy and innuendo continued to dog Arora even after he retired as CEC. On 30 April, Chandigarh’s the Tribune, a newspaper of 1881 vintage (first published as a nationalist newspaper in Lahore) carried an article by venerated superannuated nonagenarian police officer, Julio Ribeiro, headlined “The fall of the EC’s office”. Writing in his capacity as a pivot of a body called Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), consisting of retired IAS, IFS, IPS and Central services officers, Ribeiro anticipated that Arora will be “rewarded” by the Modi-Shah duo for “subtly helping the BJP in its quest for an opposition-free Bharat”, and appointed as Governor of Goa. According to Ribeiro, the message sought to be delivered was “loud and clear”: any all-India service officer who aspires for post retirement honours should “adjust to party requirements”. Arora was being appointed as Governor, according to Ribeiro and his CCG stalwarts, to “dangle a carrot to weaken a crucial institution of governance”.
Arora reacted with rectitude. “The opinion piece by Mr Ribeiro is based on factually incorrect statement that I have been nominated as Governor of Goa. Mr Ribeiro has every right to have his opinion on any issue, but at least he should have verified the basic facts”, the former CEC said. “In such a situation to write a virtual obituary of the EC, raised on the hallowed edifice of our Constitution and especially the paradigms set forth in the Preamble thereof, along with my tenure personally, I think is rather unfair and irresponsible.” The Tribune, which had highlighted Julio Ribeiro on its editorial page, unobtrusively published Arora’s rejoinder on its back page, sans comment.
This aberration by an institution founded in 1881 by nationalist landlord Dyal Singh Majithia of Umritsar (Amritsar) raises questions beyond propriety. The Tribune was set up with the help of then Congress president, Surendranath Banerjee, who sent a printing press and recruited a couple of editors from Calcutta so that a fair newspaper could be published in Punjab. Dyal Singh was associated Bramho Samaj of Raja Ram Mohun Roy. Bipin Chandra Pal—a member of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio of Congress (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Pal) was among its first editors. The list of recent editors include Prem Bhatia, V.N. Narayanan, two former media advisors to Prime Minister, H.K. Dua and Harish Khare, beside Raj Chengappa, editorial director of India Today group. The newspaper is run by an independent trust—there is no corporate ownership—a niche management in Indian media. According to a former editor of the group, who prefers anonymity, the trust management, once a boon, has of late become a bane with interference which was abhorred in the mandate of the founder, Dyal Singh Majithia. If post-truth is to cloud an institution of national heritage like the Tribune, the plight of media in India can be fathomed. (Disclaimer: this writer served as Political Editor of the Tribune between 1992-2000.)
Julio Ribeiro on 7 May wrote in the Tribune: “I beg to tarry a while to apologise to Sunil Arora for presuming that the story about his being nominated as the Governor was true! It was first published in Free Press Journal, Mumbai and taken up in a big way by the social media: Twitter; Facebook. The news was floating for a week. I have telephoned and apologised to Arora—no offence or malice was intended.
While running down the EC in recent years it is fashionable among former bureaucrats to hark back the glory of the tenure of the 10th CEC, T.N. Seshan, who was appointed at the intervention of Rajiv Gandhi by Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar in 1990. EC, till then a single-member body, was expanded to be a three-member entity. Seshan introduced Model Code of Conduct and the voters’ card. The poll reforms initiated by Seshan endure. But Seshan was not averse to seeking office post his retirement as CEC in 1996: he unsuccessfully contested against K.R. Narayanan for the post of President of India in 1997. As Congress candidate in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, he was humbled by L.K. Advani of BJP in 1999 Lok Sabha poll.
Thus perpetrators of post-truth who eulogise Seshan are perhaps not being generous with truth. Sunil Arora’s tenure as CEC merits a case study to understand Election Commission of India’s tightrope walk in these days of populism, in which rectitude seems impaired.