Opinion Sober down

In its last few days, this long-drawn election campaign served up a never-before image: of a major political party mounting a raucous show of strength in the constituency of its prime ministerial candidate —  not against its political opponents, but against the Election Commission. It isn’t as if the EC has not been questioned before by a political party. Only last month, West Bengal chief minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee was locked in shrill combat with the commission on the transfer of officials ahead of elections. The TMC chief, in fact, has made a habit of it — at about the same time last year, she had taken on the EC on the poll dates for panchayat elections. But the BJP’s public targeting and daring of the EC appears far more remarkable, and yes, unseemly, than the challenging of the EC by the TMC or other parties in the past — the TMC, after all, was only being true to its self-image of a party in permanent confrontation mode. As the national party that is making a strong bid for power at the Centre, the BJP, on the other hand, can ill afford to be seen to be swaggering about, making sweeping accusations and looking for a fight with a constitutional body and the rules of the game.

In its response to the BJP’s showy posturing, the EC has rightly counselled political parties to show “greater maturity”. It’s an admonition the BJP would do well to heed. In this election, with Narendra Modi at its helm, the party has run an especially aggressive campaign. As it draws to a close, it would even seem that this campaign has shored up the party’s claim to power. But the party must recognise that the bitterness that has been stoked by the Modi vs the Rest rhetoric between the BJP and other parties, and now between the BJP and EC, could linger on.
The EC is not just one among a complex of institutions that gives a sprawling and turbulent democracy a centre of gravity and predictability. Over the decades, it has grown into one of India’s most trusted institutions, with a hard-won and well-deserved reputation for supervising elections in which the final outcome has never been seriously questioned by the loser. Of course, there may have been aberrations and the BJP has every right to petition the commission and draw its attention to alleged distortions of the poll process. But the party cannot begin by alleging bias and imputing motives. The machismo of the Modi campaign may well have carried it thus far, but now the BJP needs to sober down.