Is the law an ass? Not just Modi, everyone flouts the code of conduct

Javed Jaffery, Bollywood’s and entertainment television’s funny man, who was also the Aam Aadmi Party’s candidate in Lucknow, made a telling point soon after he cast his vote.

He showed at least three half-page advertisements in the morning papers of that day which asked for votes hours before the polling had commenced.

Campaigning ends a clear 36 hours prior to the start of the polling; a cooling off period so the voters caught in the din of claims and counterclaims, can consider their choices. To paraphrase him: “When I see these advertisements, I don’t know what to say”.

He was on the button, about unfair advantage those parties got.

It is in this light that we must view the Election Commission’s instructions to Gujarat’s Chief Secretary and the Director-General of Police to lodge FIRs against Narendra Modi for flashing his party symbol and addressing a press conference outside the polling station in Gandhinagar.

By the poll code we have, Modi had flouted it by doing what he oughtn’t to have. When the administration acted, it virtually threw the book at him, by registering him on at least four counts. It is possible the prime ministerial aspirant may find it hard to wriggle out.

Political activists are not allowed within a specified area around a polling station, the intent being to allow the voters to exercise their franchise without being under pressure. But even while handing out voter slips close by, requests for a vote in favour of a candidate is not unknown.

The Election Commission’s directive to the state government pointed out how he had “displayed to the public election matter” by means of television coverage in areas going to polls” that day. It was “intended to influence and affect the result” not only in Ahmedabad” but other “constituencies elsewhere in the country”.

If Modi, or Rahul Gandhi or any other, had hopped onto a chopper, and gone to a state where polling was due later, displayed their party symbol and delivered a forceful speech, they may have certainly “influenced” the result.

But this is what he has been doing all these days since the campaign started, just as Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra have been. In a country shrunk by television and social media, this geography-specific rule of needing a certain kind of behaviour has lost its meaning.

There never has been a rule – by law or by the model code of conduct which is a gentlemen’s agreement among the political parties – that when polling is on in one part of the country, the campaign should cease across its length and breadth. This is not the first time we have seen multi-phase polling, though this is the longest so far.

After all, television beams messages everywhere, superfluously from areas where people have already voted. In a multi-phase polling system, more for administrative convenience than anything else, one part or the other was set to vote, some be in 36-hour cooling off phase.

Partisan invitees to television studios talking about not just themselves but their rivals are not a new thing even after the last speech is delivered by 5 pm. In fact, most of the critical work – distribution of money – is said to happen closer to the polling, sometimes even as a voter commences his walk to the polling station.

Television also overwhelms that rule which would have had meant something in slower times past. A speech, say in another region as in Varanasi, would have had the same impact because people would have seen it at home before walking to the booths.

That is where Jaffrey’s point becomes significant. What Modi did is what the newspaper advertisements from all parties on the day of voting did in Lucknow. That way, the rule seems pointless in these days of real-time delivery of messages. Is it the EC’s case that no text messages went out soliciting votes during the polling hours anywhere?

Had, say, Mulayam Singh Yadav made a speech in Varanasi yesterday it could have had the same influence on the voters, at least theoretically, as Modi’s flashing of the party’s emblem which is also the symbol on the ballot machine. That TV does not beam messages from Yadav as it does from Modi and Rahul Gandhi is another thing.

What the whole fuss – at this point in time, legally – is that Modi erred in doing what he did where he did. The issue was the geography, not the message. But technology making speedy message propagation renders it rather redundant. The EC may have to look at some rules it enforces.

Would it deem it possible to have the last day for nominations the same across the country and freeze all election related activity by the political parties and their candidates and their well-wishers the moment the polling starts in the first phase?

The implication of the multi-phase polling is that the parties which stand to gain by the campaigning lose a lot in areas where the polling was scheduled in the first phase. Those elsewhere have a longer time to be influenced and get influenced.

Let us look at it this way. If the electioneering had been frozen the moment the first phase voting started, would the Congress have had the advantage of Priyanka Gandhi stepping in to bolster her brother’s and mother’s chances in Amethi and Rae Bareily?