Two new Election Commissioners chosen, the report on “One Nation, One Election” released, and data on the Electoral Bonds Scheme made public. After an eventful Thursday, the attention now shifts to when the Election Commission (EC) will announce the election schedule and the start of the all-important stage for political parties. On Friday, the Prime Minister is expected to begin a tour of South India, one of the regions where the party still has the scope to expand. He is expected to address several rallies in various states in the region till at least March 19. Modi will be in the town of Pathanamthitta in south Kerala at 10.30 am on Friday to address a poll event and, as per a PTI report, the NDA’s Lok Sabha candidates V Muraleedharan (Attingal), Anil Antony (Pathanamthitta), Sobha Surendran (Alappuzha), and Baiju Kalasala (Mavelikkara) will be present at the event apart from Padmaja Venugopal, who recently joined the BJP after quitting the Congress. According to some reports, the PM could also visit Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu. He is also expected to address a rally in the Kolar Lok Sabha constituency in Karnataka and hold a roadshow from Mirjaguda to Malkajgiri near Hyderabad in the evening, PTI reported. In subsequent days, more events and rallies of the PM are scheduled in all five southern states, including in places such as Nagarkurnol, Shivamogga, Bidar, and Salem. In context: As Liz Mathew wrote in her Road to 2024 column last month, “In fact, the BJP government has a specific figure that it hopes to surpass: the 49.10% votes the Congress got when it won 414 seats in the post-Indira Gandhi assassination election of 1984 (which remains the largest number of seats won by a party in the Lok Sabha). In other words, to go up from the 37.36% votes it won in 2019 to somewhere close to 50%, the BJP will need to increase its vote share in almost every state." This is why the south is so important for the PM and the BJP. The party is all but saturated in the Hindi belt, where it seems confident of repeating the sweep of 2019 at the minimum. Five years ago, the BJP won all the seats in Rajasthan, Haryana, and the National Capital, won all but one in Madhya Pradesh, and won all but two in Chhattisgarh. It bagged all the seats in Gujarat, too. The only places where it can improve are the south, Maharashtra to a degree, and West Bengal and Odisha. In the Supreme Court Meanwhile, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has approached the Supreme Court, asking it to return the data on the preceding period so that it could also be made public. A five-judge Constitution Bench presided by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud is likely to take up the application on Friday. The ECI submitted the details of poll bonds sold and encashed before April 12, 2019 to the Supreme Court in accordance with the top court’s interim orders passed on April 12, 2019 and November 2, 2023. On March 11, rejecting the SBI’s request for more time to furnish the data on the sale and redemption of the bonds, the Bench asked the ECI to also publish the earlier data, noting that copies of it “would be maintained in the Office of the ECI”. The poll panel has urged the court to modify this part of the March 11 order, saying it did not retain any copies of the documents to maintain confidentiality. To upload these details, the court will have to return the sealed documents, according to the ECI petition. A separate petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), an electoral watchdog, challenging the exclusion of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) from a panel for the selection of the Chief Election Commissioner and the Election Commissioners was also scheduled to come up for hearing on Friday but it is not year clear if it will be considered.
