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A wideranging exercise
THE ELECTION COMMISSION'S announcement of the timetable for the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Manipur and Uttaranchal has come amidst a worrying escalation of tension on the Indo-Pakistan border and heightened concerns on the internal security front in the wake of the audacious December 13 terrorist attack on Parliament House. In a way, this may be seen as reflecting the panel's supreme confidence in the innate strength of the country's democratic will and the resilience of the electoral system; after all, a much wider exercise as parliamentary elections was conducted successfully less than three years ago in the shadow of the Kargil war. Yet, given the exacting demands on the security forces for counter-terrorism operations and the consequential limitations on the uniformed personnel's availability for poll-related work, it would certainly require all the skills and ingenuity of the administrative and law enforcing authorities to see the event through as scheduled and, more importantly, to ensure that the voters are enabled, by and large, to exercise their franchise freely and fairly. Logistics, particularly the part relating to deployment of security personnel in requisite strength, is indeed going to be quite a challenging task.
As for the calendar itself, while Uttar Pradesh is to have a three-phase polling, Manipur will go through the exercise in two stages and this staggering is understandable, given the large number of `hyper sensitive' constituencies in the two States, classified as such for different reasons - fragile communal equation, insurgency and so on. It will be a one-day affair in Punjab and the recently formed Uttaranchal. With the announcement of the poll schedule, the model code of conduct has become operative and this means the Governments of the day in the four States cannot carry on the business of distributing largesse or launching populist welfare schemes. Although the judiciary itself is yet to pronounce conclusively on the cutoff date for enforcement of the (non-statutory) `code', the issue is no longer a bone of serious contention, what with the Election Commission having succeeded in getting the major political parties to see the logic behind its stated position - that the code should apply right from the day on which the panel announces the poll timetable, not from the date of poll `notification'. Realistically speaking, however, the question of `cutoff' date is only of a limited relevance in a situation where unalloyed populism and vote-bank politics have become the defining principles of governance.
Beyond the nitty-gritty of the code, there are quite a few portents in the current political course that sound particularly ominous for the impending electoral process, to the point of threatening to undermine the very basics of India's democratic polity. And these have to do, first, with the hawkish rhetoric indulged in by the powers that be at the Centre after the December 13 attack and, second, with the systematic and calibrated build-up by the VHP and others of its ilk in the Sangh Parivar for the construction of a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya, which is slated to commence any time after March 12, 2002. Given the brazenly defiant way in which they are pursuing the temple agenda and with their campaign in the run-up to the D'Day all set to reach a decisive stage in mid-February, the threat to the core values of a democracy, especially in Uttar Pradesh, is very real. The unfortunate part of it all is that the BJP leadership at the Centre has been singularly soft in its responses to the VHP's provocative acts on the Ayodhya front. Now that the Election Commission has set the ball rolling, the Centre and the Rajnath Singh Government will have to ensure that the electoral process is not vitiated or hijacked by the peddlers of a viciously sectarian and divisive agenda.
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