In fact, slightly more than seventy-two years after Ambedkar’s articulation of these concerns in the Constituent Assembly, India indeed suffered such a headache when it was reported that the incumbent Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra and the two Election Commissioner, Rajiv Kumar and Anup Chandra Pandey, attended an online ‘interaction’ with the Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary on November 16 on getting a letter from the Union Law Ministry that the CEC is expected to do so. It was a demonstration of the CEC and ECs coming under the “thumb of the executive”, as had been apprehended by Dr Ambedkar in 1949.Obviously, the conduct of CEC and two ECs has come under the scanner, and fingers were raised at the independence of the Election Commission from the executive. Five former CECs described the letter of the Law Ministry to the Election Commission as unacceptable and saw it as an attack on the independence of the Commission.At a time when India has been downgraded as a “partly free country” and described as an ‘elected autocracy’, the conduct of the CEC and ECs, attending a meeting under the chairmanship of PM’s Principal Secretary, does not augur well for conducting free and fair elections, considered to be part of the basic structure of the Constitution.With elections scheduled to be held in several states, including Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa and Himachal Pradesh in the early part of 2022, the attendance of the CEC and ECs at the meeting convened by the Prime Minister’s Office is being rightfully seen with apprehension. It certainly sends a wrong message concerning the independence of the Election Commission from the Executive.
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