Tamil Nadu is going to the polls on May 16 to elect an Assembly. As usual, large sums of money being transported from place to place, obviously to bribe voters, have been seized.
While this is so, the Election Commission’s decision to replace a large number of top police officers — albeit temporarily — including Chennai’s Commissioner of Police who has been in the job for less than a year, will have the effect of raising the temperature, without appreciably raising the fairness of the election process. Also, the regular Director-General of Police of the State has been divested of his responsibility for the conduct of the poll. There cannot be a more ludicrous situation.
Nobody challenges the legality of the EC’s action: it is well within the law. Nor can anyone suspect the motive. The three members of the Commission are men of the highest integrity chosen on merit for their objectivity. Even if one of them has the slightest political leanings, he cannot afford to act on such predilections because the entire country and its political spectrum are watching every limb of the EC.
The latter is accountable to the law, and the decisions are justiciable.
But the EC’s recent decisions with respect to the Tamil Nadu Police are strange, even if similar moves had not been contested in the past.
It looks as though the EC suspects the neutrality of the officers removed from their important charges. It is just possible these officers had given room for suspicion.
If that were so, were they given an opportunity to defend themselves?
During such hotly contested elections, those in the Opposition always tend to bring up allegations, some of which may be well-founded and some totally baseless.
This is why the public need to be assured that, however short of time the Commission may have been, it had gone through a process of due diligence. Or else there will be ground to believe that the Commission acted under pressure from the Opposition.
I hold no brief for the officers affected. I know some of them well; a few others are just names to me.
I am concerned over the impact on the morale of individual officers, as well as the whole force. If the full-time DGP will have no say in the conduct of elections, at a time when he is still responsible for the maintenance of law and order, you cannot have a funnier and more untenable arrangement.
If the EC did not trust DGP Ashok Kumar, he should have been asked to go on leave, rather than be a mute witness to what may be happening around him.
I would have expected as exalted a body as the EC to act more rationally and with greater transparency.
If the public believes the police force can be made politically neutral through such knee-jerk responses in special situations, such as general elections, I would like to disabuse it of such notions. India’s police force is highly politicised. It needs drastic and fundamental reforms — bringing in autonomy, and accountability only to the law. But no political party has the will to make sure this is done. When this is the reality on the ground, actions such as the ones the EC has taken in Tamil Nadu can only be cosmetic.
(R.K. Raghavan is a former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation)
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