Daily Editorial Analysis

Should the ECI insist on inner-party elections? (GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)

Context:

• The Congress is set for elections for the post of party president. Since 1998, barring her son Rahul Gandhi’s two-year term in the interim, Sonia Gandhi has been party president.
• This has revived the debate on whether internal elections should be mandated for all political parties.

Is there any legal ground on which elections can be mandated within political parties? 

• In the 1990s, when T.N. Seshan was at the helm at the Election Commission of India (ECI), by an executive order political parties were ordered to conduct organisational elections. And because Seshan was a much respected and feared person, political parties complied with it. 
• Since then, elections are held periodically in every recognised party. If they are not able to hold an election for any reason, they seek condonation for the delay, which is liberally granted. And the ECI generally has been very soft on this.
• The ECI does not question the result or the procedure the parties followed. The ECI expects political parties to abide by their constitution, a copy of which is also submitted to the commission when the parties are registered. It is not for the commission to step in or criticise if anyone is elected unopposed. 
• In the landmark judgment in Indian National Congress (I) vs Institute of Social Welfare, the Supreme Court had reiterated that the ECI cannot take punitive action against registered parties for violating the principles of inner-party democracy.

Constitutionality:

• First, on the legal ground, because there is a great paradox here. India, it seems, is a party-led democracy or democracy based on political parties. But the phrase “political party” was nowhere mentioned or described in our Constitution. The definition of a political party for the first time enters through the anti-defection law in 1985.
• All rules and regulations apply more to candidates than to political parties in India.
• The courts have made an observation that nothing in Article 324 of the Constitution, or Section 29(A) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 tells that the ECI can actually regulate internal structures, organisations or elections of the party.
• In this sense, most political parties in India have become similar, where internal structures and organisations do not follow their own constitutional norms. 

Case of USA:

• Citing the recent internal elections of the Conservative Party in the U.K., many have claimed that leadership polls within a party diminish its status among the voters because the contestants end up criticising their own party’s policies. 

• When the U.S. electionare seen, for instance, the selection of the candidate to be the presidential nominee is done via debate, in which the contenders condemn and criticise each other.
• For instance, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton contested and called each other names, but then Mr. Obama won (as President in 2008), and Ms. Clinton was appointed Secretary of State. It could be counter-productive.

Balanced approach:

• Democracy should be at every level, and political parties are an essential pillar of democracy. And yet, therein lies the contradiction because every election is divisive.
• In a contrary scenario, if a party follows a single leader, who they worship and stand united behind, it can lead to a high command culture where only the favourite of the said leader gets promoted over the actually popular leaders. There is need to establish a balance between both these options.  

Why internal elections must take place?

• Political parties don’t have to be homogeneous in terms of both ideas and leadership. Political parties are aggregations of interests, so there are going to be differences within. Having these internal elections, meetings and contests of ideas is important.
• Second, internal elections are key for upward mobility. And that is why what is being witnessedin India and South Asia is problematic for democracy, where all political parties are centralised. They are family-controlled parties, and dynastic politics has become a norm.
• One can’tname more than three or four political parties which have survived 30 years in Indian politics and are today not controlled by a political family, where one can only rise up the ranks in the system depending on the relationship one share with the first family of that party. High command culture is a symptom of the problem whichis being witnessed today. 

Should there be new laws making organisational elections mandatory?

• The ECI does insist on organisational elections, but only gently. The parties do conduct elections, even if one considers them sham elections, but they do go through the ritual. Also an election can happen only if there are two or more candidates in the fray.
• Getting elected unopposed is also a valid election. It is not just within the political parties, but also in panchayat elections and sometimes even in Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections that candidates have got elected unopposed.
• The parties are required to inform the ECI about changes in their office-bearers and addresses. They are required to submit a document of expenditure incurred during elections and in the non-election period.
• If voters think that the organisational elections were only an exercise in tokenism, then they should throw out such leaders. 

Legislation:

• Various efforts have been made to bring about some uniformity. The 1999 Law Commission Report recommended the introduction of a regulatory framework for governing the internal structure and inner-party democracy of the political parties.
• Further, a draft titled Political Parties (Registration and Regulation of Affairs) Act, 2011, was submitted to the Ministry of Law and Justice.
• It emphasised creating an Executive committee for every political party whose members would be elected by the members of the local committees of the state units of the party, who themselves would elect the office-bearers of the party from amongst themselves, without accepting any nomination.

Way Forward:

• It remains to be seen whether the Executive of the day would want to bring about some innovative changes in the functioning of political parties as well as whether it would follow in the footsteps of its political ancestors, who had come together to ensure free and fair elections by adopting the Model Code of Conduct (MCC).