One day’s sultan

Abstract

T.N. Seshan’s tenure as Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) in the early 1990s transformed the role of the Election Commission of India in India’s electoral politics. This article examines Seshan’s reforms but concentrates in particular on the public controversies that Seshan’s tenure at the Election Commission engendered. Public debate about the role of the Election Commission brought to the surface underlying assumptions about the meaning of popular sovereignty in defining India’s democracy. It highlighted the tension between law and democracy in shaping democratic ideals in India and underscored a view of elections as legally marked by a cyclical notion of ‘electoral time’. The reforms of the Election Commission during the early 1990s, in fact, opened an unprecedented period of public debate in India on the nature of electoral democracy, which this article explores.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Aiyar, Mani Shankar . 1996. Cleaning the Augean Stables: Let’s Start with the Election Commission . Sunday. 11–17 (August): 42–44 .

Banerjee, Mukulika . 2007. Sacred Elections . Economic and Political Weekly. 42 (17): 1556–62 .

Bertrand, Romain , Jean-Louis Briquet and Peter Pels . 2006. Introduction: Towards a Historical Ethnography of Voting. In Romain Bertrand , Jean-Louis Briquet and Peter Pels (eds) The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, pp. 1–15. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .

Bidwai, Praful . 1994. The Self-Styled Galahads . Frontline. 30 December, pp. 108–10 .

Election Commission of India. n.d. Debate in Constituent Assembly on Part III—Article 289 (Existing Part XV—Elections). New Delhi: Election Commission .

Election Commission of India. 2000. Landmark Judgements on Election Law, Vol. III. New Delhi: Election Commission .

Election Commission of India. 2006. Landmark Judgements on Election Law, Vol. IV. New Delhi: Election Commission .

Election Commission of India. 2007. Model Code of Conduct for the Guidance of Political Parties and Candidates. New Delhi: Election Commission .

Freitag, Sandria B. 1989. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press .

10.

Gilmartin, David . 2007. Election Law and the ‘People’ in Colonial and Postcolonial India. In Dipesh Chakrabarty , Rochona Mazumdar and Andrew Sartori (eds) From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, pp. 55–82. New Delhi: Oxford University Press .

11.

Hauser, Walter and Wendy Singer . 1986. The Democratic Rite: Celebration and Participation in Indian Elections . Asian Survey. 26 (9): 941–58 .

12.

Jaffrelot, Christophe . 2006. Voting in India: Electoral Symbols, the Party System and the Collective Citizen. In Romain Bertrand , Jean-Louis Briquet and Peter Pels (eds) The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, pp. 78–99. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .

13.

Michelutti, Lucia . 2004. ‘We (Yadavs) are a Caste of Politicians’: Caste and Modern Politics in a North Indian Town . Contributions to Indian Sociology. 38 (1–2): 43–72 .

14.

Price, Pamela G. 1989. Kingly Models in Indian Political Behavior: Culture as a Medium of History . Asian Survey. 29 (6): 559–72 .

15.

Saha, K.C. 2005. Elections Model Code of Conduct: A Reference Handbook. Delhi: Shipra Publications .

16.

Sen, Sarbani . 2007. The Constitution of India: Popular Sovereignty and Democratic Transformations. New Delhi: Oxford University Press .

17.

Seshan, T.N. (with Sanjoy Hazarika). 1995a. The Degeneration of India. New Delhi: Viking India .

18.

Seshan, T.N. 1995b. The Regeneration of India. New Delhi: Viking India .

19.

Spencer, Jonathan . 2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

20.

Thompson, Dennis F. 2004. Election Time: Normative Implications of Temporal Properties of the Electoral Process in the United States . American Political Science Review. 98 (1): 51–64 .

21.

Tocqueville, Alexis de . 1985. Democracy in America, Vol. 1. New York: Alfred Knopf .