New Delhi: Ashok Lavasa, the only other election commissioner apart from Arun Goel who resigned from the Election Commission despite being on course to be chief election commissioner, has spoken on the methods being adopted by the Modi government for appointments of the two empty spots in the EC, despite clear instructions from the Supreme Court on establishing a process that avoids the charge of partisan, executive-led appointments. He has termed “the exclusion of the chief justice of India” as “hard to fathom”.He writes in The Indian Express, “Just over a year later, and three months after Parliament passed a law excluding the CJI from the committee, there are two vacancies in the ECI and the time to test the law and its spirit is here.” Lavasa writes that excluding the CJI, whom he notes, has never really disagreed with the PM in other such selections, creates a “predetermined bias in the committee’s view.” His exclusion, he writes, “may seem like an attempt to ensure a majority rather than relying on consensus building.”Lavasa has been explicit about failing to follow why the government initially equated the EC and the CEC with the Cabinet Secretary, but later displayed “muddled thinking” having apparently “struck a bargain” by restoring the equivalence of EC/CEC with a Supreme Court judge but then mysteriously reversing the parity in the removal process of the EC and CEC, to the original one, where only the CEC is insulated from routine removal process, not other members of the EC.He also writes that he finds it “equally confounding” why the Cabinet Secretary has been replaced “by the Law Minister as the chair of the Search Committee.” The original provision in the new law to appoint ECs, provided for “two other members… having knowledge and experience in matters relating to elections.” The purpose of changing the chairmanship and dropping “having knowledge and experience in matters relating to elections” in the case of the members, has been called out by Lavasa, as he says “the thought process behind the other provisions as proposed and amended beats my bureaucratic understanding, evolved during four decades in the government.”Also read: Five Reasons There’s a Dark Cloud Over Election Commission’s Transparency and FunctioningLavasa’s four decades in government should have ended with him being CEC, but he found himself in Manila’s Asian Development Bank instead, after the 2019 polls. In August 2020, he resigned just months short of becoming the chief election commissioner in April 2021. His resignation came a year after he became the only member of the three-member election commission to rule that Modi had violated the Model Code of Conduct while campaigning for the 2019 general election. His demand that dissent notes should be recorded in the commission’s orders on model code violations was rejected with a majority vote.The Wire had reported that just weeks after his dissent, Lavasa’s personal mobile number was placed on the list of numbers found on a leaked database of likely targets of Pegasus spyware.Later in 2019, Lavasa’s wife, son and sister were placed under the scanner of various investigative agencies. Writing in a national daily in December 2019, months prior to his resignation, Lavasa said there was a “price for honesty”.“There is a price for honesty as for everything else in life. Being prepared to pay that price, directly or by way of collateral damage, is part of the honest act,” he wrote.Earlier this month, the V-Dem (or Varieties of Democracy) report stated that India dropped down to an electoral autocracy in 2018 and remained in this category till the end of 2023. More worryingly, under its clean elections index, the report said that India was among 18 countries in which the indicator for free and fairness of elections deteriorated substantially and significantly.
