Even Raja Harishchandra would not be able to cope with Nirvachan Sadan's Messiah-power

God sent for Moses for He knew He could give Moses the Ten Commandments. Had He sent for Seshan, Seshan would have given God the Ten Commandments. Congratulations, Sir, on your Magsaysay Award.

I think the chief election commissioner would agree with me that the greatest triumph of his triumph-filled six years has been that he has actually succeeded in getting Parliament to come to grips with the agonising problem of electoral reforms. Politicians who though they could get away with money-power and Muscle-power now find themselves up against Messiah-power.

While Parliament wrestles with the Law of Elections, perhaps the election commissioners would care to turn their collective attention to the in-house problem of the commission's rules and directions, a compendium of some 500 pages of the most convoluted bureaucratese which candidates, or at any rate their agents, are required to master if they really wish to keep themselves on the right side of a watchful law.

Many of these rules, regulations, directives obiter dicta, ex cathedra pronouncements date back to the time when lawyers fought elections. Nirvachan Sadan then occupied its many empty hours drafting endless orders in language that grabbed the lawyers where they lived. The lawyers, therefore, did not demur.

We have now entered the Era of Bandit Queen Emeritus, but Nirvachan Sadan has made no effort to make its rules comprehensible in the Chambal ravines; instead, they have had the effrontery to render comprehensive the accumulated gobbledygook of 50 years by publishing the lot in a handy, if bulky, volume. I am willing to bet that none of the election commissioners has actually read all the turgid 500 pages: it would drive a man mad -- or, possibly, position him to take over from Seshan on 12.12.96.

My plea, therefore, is that if it is Parliament's duty to make the Law of Elections integrity-friendly, it is the duty of the Election Commission to translate the law into rules sufficiently simple and transparent for comprehension by the simple folk -- Taslimuddin, Churchill Alemao, D P Yadav, et al --- who are today receiving the mandate of the people to rule. Whatever their antecedents, abiding by the law must surely be -- of assumed to be -- the condition precedent to their making the law. At present, even Raja Harishchandra would not be able to cope with Nirvachan Sadan's Messiah-power.