T.N. Seshan was appointed the 10th Chief Election Commissioner of India on December 12, 1990, serving till December 11, 1996. Known as the fearless reformer, he introduced game-changing initiatives like voter ID cards, the Model Code of Conduct, and strict limits on poll expenses. In this archived video, Seshan candidly reveals who the Election Commission of India (ECI) is answerable to, amidst the controversies he faced while enforcing free and fair elections. Watch.
00:00Indian elections are damaged by a number of unfortunate things, some of it curable but not being cured, some of it is incurable.
00:09What are some of these things after its damage?
00:11One is the use of religion, caste, language and all kinds of petty matters relating to the heterogeneity of India's population for appeal to votes.
00:23This is something which is tremendously unfortunate.
00:25Everybody used to address me as chief election commissioner, government of India.
00:32Does it make a lot of difference that I am not the chief election commissioner of the government of India, but I am the chief election commissioner of India.
00:40That's a very minor change in emphasis, but it's a major difference that I am not part of the government.
00:47Who are you answerable to?
00:49Certainly I am answerable to the president.
00:51Certainly I am answerable to the people.
00:53Certainly I am answerable to parliament in the larger sense.
00:56I am answerable to the courts for any wrong which I may do.
00:59All this is true.
01:00So posturing has been an essential element of this.
01:04But in 1977, after all that turmoil which happened in 75 and 76, parliament went and passed a law which said that expenses incurred by friends and expenses incurred by party need not be included in the total of the expenditure.
01:19Now this is like completely opening the back side of the wall while trying to say the front door is under guard.
01:28Efforts to get this altered by myself, my predecessors, for the last 20 years from 77 till today have not succeeded.
01:39With the result that over the years Indian elections have come to, we describe three C's as I call them, cash, criminality and corruption.
01:47Or three M's, money power, muscle power, minister power.
01:52How are you going to go about enforcing that after the election?
01:55That is the law and yet we all recognize that that sum of money is going to be exceeded.
01:59No, what we have done is that whereas the efforts at getting parliament to amend the law or to take away this exclusion which was made in 1977 is wiped out so that all expenses will be attributed.
02:15Two, to get parties to write their accounts and make their own receipts and expenditure transparent.
02:22These two are taking time.
02:23But what we have done is, we have now tried to clamp at the expenditure end of it.
02:32See what's happening in some of our neighboring countries where the elections carry no credibility.
02:38Today in India one can say that the elections carry a large degree of credibility.
02:44I'm not saying they're fully credible.
02:46But surely between credibility and lack of credibility, the percentage is clearly in favor of credibility.
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