To have one EC, or many?

The underlying logic behind multiple Election Commissions -- that elections were too important to be left to the executive government alone -- was generally accepted. However, we know that the Constituent Assembly changed its mind on this issue in 1949 when it came to deciding the final shape of the ECI.

In a previous article (in 2021), I had written about the debate in the Constituent Assembly (CA) on the creation of the Election Commission of India (ECI). Some members felt that its role should be limited to national level elections (such as elections to the Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha) and the states should be allowed to set up their own Election Commissions to oversee elections to state Assemblies. However, this was a minority view. The majority of CA members felt that one central Election Commission was a better idea. This was further supported by Ambedkar and Nazruddin Ali Ahmed as necessary to enable Dalits and Muslims to vote freely.

However, what an ECI should be and what it should do was debated much earlier as well in the CA. To understand how that debate panned out, let’s go back to July 29, 1947, a few weeks before India became independent.

The Constituent Assembly in July 1949 was discussing the report of the Union Constitution Committee. Keep in mind that it had not yet been decided that India would have only one Constitution. So, this committee’s mandate was only to look at the Constitution at the national level, with a separate committee considering constitutions at the provincial level. The Union Constitution Committee, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, had recommended (among other things) that all elections, whether at the national or state level, should be overseen by a commission appointed by the President of India. This recommendation had come up for debate earlier on July 29, 1947.

Several members did not like this clause. One of the first to object was H V Pataskar, who suggested a change that this clause should limit the role of such a commission only to national-level elections. Pataskar, you will recall, had the same objection two years later, too, when the final draft of the Constitution was being debated. Pataskar preferred that state-level elections be left to the Governors of the states, and the need for impartiality did not convince him otherwise either. By the way, at this point in the making of the Constitution, Governors were supposed to be elected by the people of the state.

Pataskar found a lot of support in the CA on this notion. T Prakasam argued that the experience of recent elections had showed that states could be just as capable as the national government in holding elections at the state level. Biswanath Das pointed to the logistical difficulties of conducting an election at the state level without involving state governments and therefore, he argued, state elections should be left to the states. Naziruddin Ahmad also supported the move to have elections at the state level be overseen by the states, although he would later change his mind.

One key objector, however, was K Santhanam. He objected to elections being overseen by a specific commission. He argued that the whole task of conducting elections was too complicated to be handled by one specialised commission. Rather, he felt that the executive government should conduct the elections, but any disputes or controversial issues should be decided by a judicial commission and not an executive one. However, no one supported him on this.

Ambedkar defended the idea of a specialised commission pointing to the recommendations of the Fundamental Rights Committee. He argued that a truly free and fair election would only be possible if the agency conducting the elections were to be free of executive control. Ambedkar didn’t have a view one way or the other about whether there should be only one commission or several. He was fine with the amendment proposed to have the Election Commission of India deal only with national-level elections.

With this limited amendment passed, it seemed as though there would be multiple Election Commissions to conduct national and state-level elections across the country. The underlying logic -- that elections were too important to be left to the executive government alone -- was generally accepted. However, we know that the Constituent Assembly changed its mind on this issue in 1949 when it came to deciding the final shape of the ECI. How and why it changed its mind, I will discuss in the subsequent column.