Congress should accept demand by senior leaders to make presidential elections’ electoral rolls public

Congress should accept demand by senior leaders to make presidential elections’ electoral rolls public

Leaders such as Shashi Tharoor, Manish Tewari, Prithviraj Chavan and Pradyut Bordoloi, some of them potential candidates, insist that making the rolls public is an essential step to ensuring transparency in the election process.

The Congress leadership should accept the demand made by a few senior leaders that the party make the electoral rolls for its presidential election public. The Congress, long used to a nomination culture, has attempted to carve a new path, and probably enthuse cadres, by deciding to elect the party chief: The last time it held an election to the president’s post was in 1999, which Sonia Gandhi won by defeating Jitendra Prasada, while Rahul Gandhi was elected to the post unopposed in 2017. This is a small but important step that can further internal democracy and enthuse cadres in the country’s main Opposition party. An elected president, especially from outside the Nehru-Gandhi family, can also blunt the BJP campaign that the Congress is merely a family enterprise. In such circumstances, it is necessary for the Congress to ensure that the election process is held in a free and fair manner, and also seen to be doing so. It will also send out a message across the political spectrum, which, unfortunately, is crowded with outfits led by founder-chiefs who prefer to appoint family members to party posts and ministerships than allow leaders to emerge through internal elections.

However, the Congress’s Central Election Authority (CEA) has refused to budge on the matter citing absence of precedence. It has held that the presidential election is an internal matter of the party and the electoral rolls could be misused if rivals manage to access them. These are facile arguments. Leaders such as Shashi Tharoor, Manish Tewari, Prithviraj Chavan and Pradyut Bordoloi, some of them potential candidates, have a point when they insist that making the rolls public is an essential step to ensuring transparency in the election process. Also, the electoral college consists of about 10,000 Pradesh Congress Committee delegates and it is not an easy task for a candidate to reach out to each of them via the PCCs. The CEA would be doing the party a disservice if it continues to be intransigent on the issue and allow critics to question the fairness of the election process.