A five-phase election in a small, largely peaceful state such as Jharkhand boggles the mind, especially when Maharashtra took just one day, and Chhattisgarh two. The Election Commission is making polls a cumbersome and numbing affair. It hurts governance and also forces political parties to stretch and mount expensive campaigns.
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We are squeezed to death by bureaucratic overreach. The media-courts-bureaucracy has the nation in a death hug. First the media creates a firestorm often based on dubious evidence. The courts react by overreaching and grandstanding. The bureaucracy makes rules that make it impossible to operate. Just look at how the mobile industry has been crushed, how airlines are burdened by layers and layers of rules, and how courts overreached by cancelling cancelling coal allocations and destroyed national energy security.
So what does this have to do with elections? The election commission is itself a massive bureaucracy not answerable to anybody. It has been strengthened by the courts to such an extent that it now revels in it power to transfer and control during the elections. Their agenda is to ensure free elections and if it takes a month or two months, it just gives them greater control. It is not part of their calculus if the economy is damaged and jobs are lost or governance grinds to a halt during the elections.
We need to let the politicians govern – good or bad – they can do the balancing and they are answerable to the people. With unelected bodies we have lost control of governance. Virtually every ill today – environment, economy, crime and even security – the problems are made intractable by unelected bodies with a single point agenda.