One EC, that does its job

In the previous column, I wrote about how in July 1947, the Constituent Assembly (CA) had agreed that the Election Commission of India (ECI) would only focus on conducting national elections, proposing state-level election commissions for Assembly elections. In this part, I will go into why the CA changed its mind over two years.

After the initial debates agreed on the principles of the proposed Constitution, the Drafting Committee, under the chairmanship of B R Ambedkar got down to its task of actually drafting the Constitution itself. On February 21, 1948, the draft Constitution was presented to the CA. This was the base document which eventually evolved into the Constitution of India.

In the specific context of the Election Commission, the draft Article 289 provided for an ECI, which would conduct the elections to the Parliament and to the posts of President and Vice President, i.e., “national elections”. It also provided for State Election Commissions, which would be appointed at the state level to hold elections to the state legislatures and the office of the Governor. It’s interesting to see that even in 1948, the post of Governor was intended to be an elected one, though the final choice of Governor was with the President.

However, when this Article came up for debate in July 1949, Ambedkar sprung a surprise and proposed to replace it with a new one. He proposed a single Central Election Commission to conduct all national and state-level elections. This was the complete opposite of what the CA had decided earlier. The new Article also guaranteed the independence of this ECI in a number of ways, with everything from how Election Commissioners were to be appointed, removed, and their terms and conditions of service.

H N Kunzru was having none of it. He insisted that Ambedkar explain the change properly to the CA before it was voted on. Ambedkar launched into a solid defence, arguing that the change was necessary because of the tendency of state governments (which was becoming evident even then) to favour one group that was dominant in a state over others in the matter of preparing electoral rolls.

What Ambedkar was talking about was the process of drawing up of the very first electoral rolls, even before India got its Constitution. The full story of this exercise is wonderfully told in Israeli scholar Ornit Shani’s book, How India Became Democratic. While this was a process driven by the bureaucracy, Shani also points out the hostility of Assamese to Bengali settlers in Assam getting on the electoral lists -- something that still informs the debate on the Citizenship Amendment Act in Assam. These tensions reached the CA and the Union Government. Though Ambedkar did not specifically mention which state he had in mind when proposing the changed Article 289, he eventually revealed that it was the experience of malpractices in Assam and Bengal, which had been widely reported at that time, which prompted this change between 1948 and 1949.

However, H V Pataskar, who had two years earlier called for state-level election commissions, was unconvinced. He launched into a passionate defence of the federal principles that had been the basis for his argument for state-level election commissions. He was not convinced by Ambedkar’s argument that because some states had been partial to majority communities, states cannot be entrusted with conducting state elections. In a speech that spilled over into a second day, Pataskar complained that the federal principles that had informed the initial drafts of the Constitution had been abandoned in favour of a more centralised form of government. However, he was in a minority on this issue and the modified Article 289 was passed and is today Article 324 of the Constitution.

Seeing how the shape of the Election Commission changed from 1947 to 1949 tells us how the framers of the Constitution went from being idealists to pragmatists. They realised that governance and nation-building require making difficult choices about which principles to give more importance over others. While they cherished the principle of federalism, they took the view that the democratic principle of free and fair elections comes above all else.

In the midst of the eighteenth general elections, one hopes the ECI acts to uphold this core principle of the Constitution of India.