On April 12, 2004, 22 persons were killed in the stampede when saris were distributed during the birthday celebrations of the senior BJP leader, Lalji Tandon. Mr. Tandon is reported to be the informal election agent for Prime Minister Vajpayee in Lucknow constituency.
During the election time when an informal agent of Prime Minister distributed saris to poor women, it can be concluded that it is aimed at wooing the voters and comes under the purview of bribery act and violation of election code of conduct.
The technicality may extricate Mr. Tandon from any punishment. However, the
Prime Minister and the BJP which profess discipline in election contest and
projects a 'holier than thou' image can not abdicate the moral responsibility
for this event. It is shocking that even the Prime Minister who enjoys the support of the whole
nation had to resort to such electoral gimmicks which are against the election
code of conduct. On that day, Mr. Vajpayee was not technically/officially the
candidate in Lucknow as he had not filed the nomination papers till that date.
But this is only a technical excuse. Otherwise he is known to contest from Lucknow. The Prime Minister and BJP say that it is not done at the behest of the Prime Minister that the saris were distributed.
The argument is accepted but in the aftermath of the incident, the Prime Minister should have reprimanded Mr. Tandon and must have taken a public apology himself to set the record straight. He should have tried to come out clean when his reputation was damaged by his informal election agent. Instead BJP and the Prime Minister tried in vain to give a clean chit to Mr. Tandon and also went to the extent of justifying the act of distributing saris.
It is pathetic that the Prime Minister himself underestimated his own and his government's performance. If he had really emerged as a successful leader of
this country and if he as a Parliamentary member representing from Lucknow had
developed that constituency, he should be asking for support based on his performance. Such political gimmicks like distributing saris is a clear exploitation of poverty and a clear violation of code of conduct. This kind of violations must be happening all over the country in a concealed way and for want of evidences they must have gone unnoticed by the Election Commission. However, what had happened in Lucknow is a blatant violation and that too in the Prime Minister's
constituency. This can not be brushed aside.
It is a laudable action of the Election Commission to ask the Uttar Pradesh Government to register a case of bribery and illegal gratification under section 171-B of the Peoples' Representation Act against Mr.Tandon. It also ordered the transfer of the District Magistrate and the Senior Superintendent of Police of Lucknow for "failure" to take preventive action against the organizers. Taking a serious view of the distribution of saris in Lucknow, which resulted in a stampede, the Election Commission issued showcause notice to the Bharatiya Janata Party. And also asked the party to explain why action should not be taken against it for "breaching" the
model code of conduct by distributing the "largesse" to voters on election
eve . All the right thinking neutral voters of this democracy only wish that all the culprits are identified and punished
under the law and only then such violators would get the signal.
There is also a technicality involved in progressing this enquiry. If it is clearly proven before the law that BJP as a party and through circumstantial evidence Mr. Tandon as the informal agent of Mr.Vajpayee had violated the model code of conduct,
although Mr. Vajpayee had not filed his nomination until that date, Lucknow constituency voters have got influenced as per the
law. In such a case, should not the election be countermanded in Lucknow and fresh announcement for receiving nominations be issued? It can not be that BJP/Mr.Tandon violated the code of conduct but still the election process can go on in Lucknow as scheduled. It should be either that there was a violation and hence countermanding of election necessitated and Mr. Tandon be punished or there was no violation of code of conduct and hence the case for punishing Mr. Tandon does not stand before the law.
IT CANNOT BE BOTH.
The Chennai district collector was also transferred allegedly for not acting as per the law and for allowing the large scale manipulation of voters'
list. While
we can take solace in our ECs iron handed supervision on such manipulations in an effort to conduct the election in a free and fair
manner, it is deplorable that even after 57 years of Independence, we are still not evolved. Our voters are
becoming more educated (in terms of seeing through the petty acts and designs of politicians) and politicians should understand that performance is the only thing that would help
retain/coming back to power. This is crystal clear from the voters' support to the
Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh Chief Ministers which can be sheerly attributed to
their good performances.
In the last couple of weeks, there was also another issue that got debated threadbare. This is about opinion and exit polls. Election Commission explored
the possibility of passing an Ordinance to ban these opinion and exit polls. Fortunately better sense prevailed on the nation thanks to the outright rejection of the EC's suggestion by the Attorney General. Opinion polls would indeed induce a "bandwagon" mentality that could sometimes help the party predicted to win. At the same time one should not ignore the fact that the
neutral voters who otherwise would have been callous in exercising their franchise would get provoked by these opinion polls to go to the booths and register their wish
if the predictions are not matching the wish of the neutral voters. In psephology parlance, it is called "underdog" effect. It is not unfair to expect the "bandwagon" and the "underdog"
effects to cancel each other.
Also, the opinion polls indicate to political parties the key issues that people are bothered about. Based on opinion polls
our political parties should remove Ram (Ayodhya) and Rome (Sonia's foreign origin)
from their
election strategies and concentrate on issues closer to voters such as unemployment, poverty, literacy, population explosion, sanitation, drinking water, and good medical
facilities. This way, the opinion polls should help in
focusing their election campaign and should also provide inputs to them in preparing their manifestos. In fact, our political parties would hugely benefit from such opinion polls.
Having said these, one should also make sure that these polls list all the details about how these polls were conducted- the number of people interviewed , their geographical details, their economic and educational status etc. It should also be binding on the organizers of these polls to announce the date/ period during which these polls were conducted and also the statistical error involved in such polls. If we take care of all the possible qualifiers while releasing the opinion poll/exit poll results, there is no reason to believe that voters could be influenced by them.
If we still believe that the voters could be influenced, our politicians are underestimating the judging power of the voters.
(To be continued)
