What made TN Seshan the knight in shining armour in Indian electoral cesspool

Well. None of those who played or did not play in this are alive today and hence surmises ought to remain surmises. What matters is that Seshan, in a few months after his arrival at the Nirvachan Sadan, an imposing high-rise on the fringes of Lutyen’s Delhi, ended up turning into a darling for many; he did end up turning the Election Commission into a cog in the many wheels of our electoral democracy. Seshan decided to stand up to politicians and spoil their sleep. He put a stop to use of state machines and buildings by politicians during campaign; spending during elections were monitored and politicians went scurrying to devise means to circumvent the election expenditure laws!

It makes sense to interrogate what is it that made a Seshan, as he came to be known since then, the knight in shining armour who, many thought and still think, cleansed the political cesspool of a lot of its filth. A short answer would be that Seshan came to the Nirvachan Sadan, assuming the Constitutional office in December 1990, at a time when politics in India was at cross-roads and parties across the spectrum had found virtue in practising politics as the art of the possible.

As things were, the impression that all are naked in the bathtub (adapting a saying in Hindi, Haman Meh Sab Nangey Hai) thanks to the several spells of party hopping and floor crossings,  a tendency that began in 1967, went into great heights between 1977-79 and culminating in the fractured mandate in the 1989 general elections and the dirty games that men played behind and on stage leading to the fall of the VP Singh government had raised a lot of questions on the merits of parliamentary democracy. This was not all.

The 1980s in our political discourse was also marked by a whole lot of ruptures that brought home the truth that some of the ideals that we as a nation had set to ourselves in January 1950 were lost. There was trouble in Punjab and Assam, and Kashmir was beginning to turn turbulent. The mid-1980s was also when efforts to pre-dominate cultural nationalism as against the nationalism that the Constitutional scheme had envisaged was gathering mass.

There was the rise of the oppressed castes manifesting in such parties as the BSP in Uttar Pradesh and then came the government’s decision, on August 7, 1989, to implement some parts of the Second Backward Classes  Commission’s (known otherwise as the Mandal Commission) recommendations on empowering the Other Backward Classes. This was also when the fruits of the Nehru-Mahalanobis model were bearing and the proportion of the middle classes in India had become larger than it was a decade before.

This class, unwilling to wait for a larger number of the poor too became like them, had also landed in the media and elsewhere from where they could articulate. And they identified the common enemy to all their aspirations: The Political Class. The August 7, 1989 decision which opened echelons in the bureaucracy under the Union to those who were kept out hitherto was, perhaps, the last straw on the middle class camel’s back.

It was only natural, in such circumstances, for the middle classes to look for their hero, a messiah. Seshan indeed fitted in to the role eminently. He ‘tamed’ the politicians as many held then and have articulated today too. He showed ‘spine’ some insist even while they agree to gloss over that he did nothing of the kind as cabinet secretary. Seshan, however, was as much a victim of his own times.

As is the wont with messiahs, Seshan too turned self-righteous and did not let the two other Commissioners appointed to be with him – GVG Krishnamurthy and MS Gill – to do any work. He lost the battle in the Supreme Court. But to his credit, I will hold, that he abided by the apex court’s order declaring all three as equals and the CEC as only first among the equals (a point the two others were pressing for long) and worked with them until his term as CEC ended in December 1996.

Seshan did speak things that were untrue to K Govindan Kutty, a journalist then and one who wrote a biography of him: Seshan: An Intimate Story, published in 1994, even when he remained the CEC. One of such un-truths was his claim there that he had taken the editor of a large newspaper, with headquarters in Chennai, to deal with four of his reporters (one of them being me) for asking him things that he did not like in a Meet the Press programme at the Press Club of India. Well. He was asked to explain a few things and these were asked in a hostile manner; Seshan had demanded those journalists to be sent out. It did not happen. Nor did the editor ask anyone anything about that as Seshan claimed.

All that shall pass. In his demise it should be said that Seshan was a product of the time and his efforts did yield some results insofar as cleansing the cess-pool of electoral politics for a while. Many of those were short-lived and that perhaps is the limitation of messiahs being depended upon to clean up a structure rather than opting the long and difficult road to restore democracy.

Read Krishna Ananth's columns here.