Wow! That escalated quickly! We are back to seeing videos of policemen misbehaving with protesters, having first removed the name tags they are required to wear. And it looks as though the Election Commission lied to the people of India when it suggested that the Supreme Court had approved the contentious Form 6, which has caused so much misery to voters and cast further doubt on the poll body’s integrity.
When the first Jantar Mantar protests started, hardly anyone thought that they would amount to very much. There had been protests about leaked exam papers before but they had died out relatively quickly. And as for the Cockroach Janta Party, the political establishment did not take it seriously, treating it as a social media phenomenon that would find little support on the ground.
That’s why the government miscalculated so badly. It believed that Sonam Wangchuk and his wife could be won over — which they were — and that the protests would die down — which they did not.
They also drew the wrong conclusions from the age and gender of the protesters and believed that if the police let loose a reign of terror, the young people, and especially the women, would run home in fear.
In fact, as we know now, it was the brutality of the Delhi Police and the thugs who accompanied them that made India take the side of the brave protesters, none of whom was intimidated by the ruling party’s bully boys.
I wrote then that the government had a two-pronged strategy to recover from this fiasco. On the one hand, it would reach out directly to young people by trying to borrow their conversational idiom with nostril-forward selfie videos and the use of what it thought were youthful phrases. And on the other, it would wait for the Assembly elections due in Uttar Pradesh next year. It reckoned it would win them and could then claim that Narendra Modi’s popularity and moral authority were both intact. There were, it knew, likely to be more agitations, but the moment the UP results came in, it would claim that the protesters did not reflect the mood of the nation.
Also read: The Gyanesh Kumar controversy & Modi govt: When things go wrong the crises keep coming
The Gyanesh Kumar problem
For this strategy to work, the Election Commission was crucial. All that the Chief Election Commissioner had to do was to keep his head down for a few months and ensure that the BJP won UP. The problem is that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s arrogance is exceeded only by his foolishness.
One obvious example is the SIR exercise in Delhi. Frankly, there was very little for the BJP to gain from manipulating the electoral rolls in Delhi, where an Assembly election is not due until 2030 and which contributes a relatively small number of seats at a parliamentary election.
Yet such was Gyanesh Kumar’s foolishness — and hubris after the BJP’s brilliant success in West Bengal — that he authorised, over the objections of nearly everyone, including his own colleagues at the Commission, an exercise that struck around 47 lakh voters out of a total of roughly 1.45 crore voters from the Delhi rolls during the SIR enumeration phase. Of the remaining roughly 97 lakh voters who remained on the draft list, about 33 lakh were issued notices.
Many of these people were actually BJP voters, and others were elderly people who had voted before, often in every election. Even if you accept the Opposition’s claim that Gyanesh is not a straight guy, this was not evidence of rigging (that comes later) but of sheer incompetence. Even people who had been willing to give Gyanesh the benefit of the doubt until then decided that he was either incompetent or crooked. Why else would he tamper so completely with the basic electoral mechanism of India’s democracy?
The uproar over the Delhi deletions was accompanied by an exposé in The Indian Express, which suggested that Gyanesh had ridden roughshod over the protests of his fellow Election Commissioners and created grave doubts about the integrity of the centralised computer system that helped compile the rolls.
Among the issues that arose was the alteration of Form 6, which all voters have to fill to get on the rolls. The Express exposé suggested that the controversial changes had been made arbitrarily over the objections of the other Election Commissioners, who pointed out that the Election Commission could not alter the form at will because its format had been prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. CEC Gyanesh Kumar went ahead and made the changes anyway. When the exposé appeared, he made the Commission declare that the Supreme Court had approved the new Form 6.
It hadn’t. At least that is what the Court categorically said on Monday. “Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us. Let’s be clear,” Chief Justice Surya Kant announced.
So, was Gyanesh Kumar telling fibs to justify his behaviour? That’s certainly what the Opposition claimed.
“It is now established beyond doubt that Gyanesh Kumar changed Form 6 illegally and unilaterally. This is just one more proof of him abusing his position to help the BJP,” Rahul Gandhi tweeted.
This slap on the face of the Commission is pretty much unprecedented. After the fiasco of the Jantar Mantar protests, which snowballed because Prime Minister Narendra Modi took too long to sack Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the obvious solution was for the government to move Gyanesh out of the Election Commission and give him a governorship or something similar.
The Prime Minister did not do this for two reasons. The first was the familiar one: Modi thinks bowing to public pressure makes him seem weak. The second one was more crucial: the BJP needs Gyanesh to help it win the UP election.
Also read: Narendra Modi has discovered that sometimes it pays to give in
A new cause for the protesters
With this hardline position firmly in place, the government has given the Jantar Mantar protesters a new cause. We are already seeing a slow-motion replay of the exam protests, with similar allegations of arbitrary police action and brutality echoing across social media. But this time around there is no happy solution on the horizon. There is no Wangchuk to help the government. There is no Pradhan to be sacrificed. And the Cockroach Janta Party knows that it will lose momentum if it gives up the protest, so it will do everything it can to press ahead.
Two things can now happen. Option one is that the government remains stubborn. In which case people will conclude that it needs the discredited Gyanesh to rig elections. And any UP victory will lack legitimacy and, far from proving that the government’s moral authority is intact, will have the opposite effect. If the BJP wins thanks to a compromised Election Commission, the fight may shift to the streets.
Elsewhere in the country, the youth protests may die down, but they will erupt again with renewed vigour the next time there is a scandal or a contentious issue. Which, judging by the events of the past month, will happen soon enough. No matter what happens in UP, I doubt if PM Modi’s moral authority will be enhanced as long as Gyanesh is in office.
Option two is to end the protests at a stroke by shifting Gyanesh. Yes, this will embolden the protesters, but if the government plays its cards shrewdly, it can give the credit to the CJP and divide the opposition by creating a rift between the Congress and the CJP. Yes, it may lose UP without Gyanesh, but that could be a risk worth taking — if it wins UP without Gyanesh’s help, it will silence many of its critics, and the BJP will be able to claim the moral high ground.
My sense is that Narendra Modi will wait a few days, take the temperature of the nation and then decide what to do next. But the decision must come sooner rather than later.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)