Image Courtesy: Economic Times

On Wednesday, the Election officials gave a clean chit to five students and a former alumnus of Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya (MGAHV), in the case of allegedly violating a model code of conduct in poll-bound Maharashtra leading to their expulsion, The Telegraph reported.

The students against whom the complaint had been launched for violating the Model Code of Conduct by organizing ‘mass demonstrations with the intent to interfere in the administrative process’, were cleared by the office of the Wardha collector – the district’s electoral officer.

ChandanSaroj, Neeraj Kumar, Rajesh Sarthi, RajnishAmbedkar, Pankaj Vela and VaibhavPimpalkar, all from Dalit and Other Backward class communities had been expelled after they protested against the administration’s decision to block them from writing letters to PM NarendraModi about the rising incidents of mob lynching,the recent government decisions on Kashmir and the policy of privatisation, apart from the shielding of rape-accused leaders.

RajnishAmbedkar, a Dalit research scholar and one of the expelled students said that the students had explained to the election officials that the protest was a part of their democratic right and that it was wrong of the university to expel them as not belonging to any political party, they hadn’t violated any law.

Moreover, the expulsion order did not make any mention of the event that was organised against the sedition case filed against the celebrities who wrote an open letter to the PM.

Please embed the 1^storder here.

ChandanSaroj, who organized the event said that since they were protesting against the saffronisation of the university, their voices were being stifled.

The expulsion order was followed by another order which said that the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules prohibited demonstrations and sit-in protests in university premises.

Please embed the 2^nd order here.

Students have also accused the university vice-chancellor of being affiliated to the RashtriyaSwayamsevakSangh (RSS).

The District Collector wrote to the University administration saying that the university had no authority to invoke the model code against the students.

On Sunday, the university revoked the expulsions but sent details of the protest to the collector as a complaint of code violation by the students.The collector asked all the students to submit their responses and depose before electoral officials, which they did.The university is planning to set up an enquiry into the protest to see if the students had violated any university rules.

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Violent events rise by 9.9% and violent deaths by 13.4% when a regional party comes to power, says our analysis. We, associate professors of economics, studied the relationship between the election of a regional-party representative and political violence. We defined regional parties as those that are officially recognised by the Election Commission of India as “state parties” and have experienced electoral success in a geographically concentrated area.

There were 74 regional parties active during the period of our study. Some of these are the Asom Gana Parishad, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), Bodoland People’s Front, Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, Naga People’s Front and Telugu Desam Party.

The study looked at constituency-level assembly election data between 1988 and 2011 and events of political violence between 1989 and 2015.
Regional political parties are a defining feature of Indian democracy. There are several states where the presence of national parties such as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Congress is marginal or where they depend heavily on alliances with dominant regional parties. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the BJP and the Congress play a secondary role in alliances led by regional stalwarts AIADMK and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) that have been in power since 1967.

Regional parties may, in principle, be better equipped to bring the government to the people, at least relative to national parties. They typically contest elections on a platform that appeals specifically to a geographically concentrated population that commonly identifies along some dimension, such as language, ethnicity, or “nationality”.

But regionalism can come at a price, we found.

Many regional parties are borne out of regional movements that demand greater autonomy, for local populations. They are siblings of the extreme and violent organisations that were borne out of the same regional movements. So, regional parties often retain a complicated and potentially symbiotic relationship with the more extreme segments of the broader movement and may facilitate or overlook the violent activities of extremists in exchange for political support come election time.

The figure 1 (a & b) plots the average number of violent events against the percentage of seats won by national parties [1 (a)] and by regional parties [1(b)]. Figure 1 (a) implies that a 10 percentage point rise in the win percentage of national parties is associated with an 11.94% fall in political violence. The bottom figure implies that a 10 percentage point increase in the win percentage of regional parties is associated with a 14.26% increase in political violence.

Figure 1(a) :  The Number Of Violent Events And The Win Percentage For National Parties

Figure 1(b) : The Number Of Violent Events And The Win Percentage Of Regional Parties

Figure 2 plots the average occurrence of violence against the margin of victory or defeat for a regional political party candidate. To the right of the vertical line at 0 are cases where a regional party candidate won the assembly seat. To the left, those where a regional party candidate lost. The figure shows that average occurrence of a violent event increases when the local MLA belongs to a regional political party. 

Figure 2: Causal Effect Of Electing A Regional MLA On Political Violence

Secessionist roots are a factor

One explanation for the rise in this political violence could be the secessionist origins of many regional parties.

The study divided data into states that did and did not report any active secessionist movement during our sample period. The first category included states such as Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, and Tripura. Then there were states like Gujarat, which primarily experienced Hindu-Muslim conflicts, and those like Andhra Pradesh that dealt with mostly insurgent Naxalite violence.

We found that the increase in violence associated with local regional party rule was driven entirely by states with a history of secessionism. This suggested that the election of a regional party increases secessionist violence in particular.

However, many of these states also experienced communal (nativist) violence. To determine whether the increased violence was due to secessionism or nativism, we further divided the data according to the protagonists involved in the violence. The idea was that secessionist violence would involve insurgents and central or state government forces, while nativist violence would involve groups of insurgents and civilians.

We found that only violence between insurgents and government forces increased when a regional representative was elected, further confirming that the election of these candidates cause secessionist violence in particular.

We also investigated if the level of violence depended on whether the regional party was solely responsible for governing the state or was only a member of a coalition. The violence, we found, was driven entirely by instances where regional parties were part of a governing coalition. This suggested that greater access to executive power may be a means of appeasing the violent groups associated with these regional political parties.

Should regional parties be curbed?

The results do not imply that regional parties should be banned from participation in elections in India. For one, the study estimated the causal effect of individual representatives who belong to regional parties. To curb their electoral role would also need an estimate of the causal effect of banning them.

Also, regional political parties can, in principle, confer significant benefits on the voters they represent. These and other hard-to-measure benefits need to be taken into account before drawing extreme conclusions about limiting the role of regional political parties. 

(Magesan is an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary, Canada, and Kapoor is associate professor of economics at the Erasmus University, the Netherlands.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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According to a sting operation carried out by ABP News, the special observer for the Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency reportedly spent 48 hours trying to find a way to reject the nomination of dismissed Border Security Force (BSF) personnel Tej Bahadur Yadav, whom the Samajwadi Party had fielded against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Varanasi.
 
Praveen Kumar, a senior IAS officer from the Tamil Nadu cadre, was appointed as special observer for the Varanasi Parliamentary seat by the Election Commission (EC). As per an ABP News report, Kumar said that he had to brainstorm for 48 hours to find out which sections under Representation of People Act, 1951 would have to be used to send notices to Yadav, News Central reported. The news channel recorded Kumar making the statement during a sting operation. “I have spent 48 hours… In the gap between first and second nomination, we checked all the rules… We didn’t neglect anything… I had discussions with the DM Returning Officer and lawyers over the phone, Election Commission… Everyone this 33 (3)… There is 33 (3) how you can accept… Go and check section 33(3) on the Internet it will be clear,” he told ABP News.
 
According to the report, Returning Officer Surendra Singh had issued two notices to Yadav after he had submitted his nomination papers. The first notice was related to Section 9 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. As per this section, a central government or state government official who has been dismissed for corruption or disloyalty to the State would be disqualified from contesting elections for a period of five years from the date of such dismissal. Further, Section 9 (2) states that in such cases, a person has to obtain a certificate from the Election Commission to contest elections.
 
Speaking to ABP News, Yadav and his lawyer Rajesh Gupta clarified that there was no need for him to produce an Election Commission certificate as he was dismissed from the BSF for indiscipline. “I found that the rule was specifically for those who were disloyal or corrupt. Such people are meant to take a clearance from the Election Commission. I was not involved in any such thing; I put all my documents together quickly and then submitted the affidavit to the returning officer again. He accepted it,” Yadav said.
 
Later, the returning officer sent Yadav another notice pertaining to Section 33 (3) of Representation of the People Act, 1951. This section is related to individuals dismissed from government services. Unlike Section 9, this section does not specify “disloyalty” and “corruption” as reasons for dismissal from service.
 
“Where the candidate is a person who, having held any office referred to in 4[section 9] has been dismissed and a period of five years has not elapsed since the dismissal, such person shall not be deemed to be duly nominated as a candidate unless his nomination paper is accompanied by a certificate issued in the prescribed manner by the Election Commission to the effect that he has not been dismissed for corruption or disloyalty to the State,” states Section 33 (3) of RP Act, 1951.
 
The returning officer had asked Yadav to submit a certificate issued from the EC that he had not been dismissed for corruption or disloyalty to the state by 11 am on May 1. “He gave me the notice at 6 pm on the previous day. How was I supposed to go to Delhi and bring the certificate? My lawyer still went to Delhi and reached the Election Commission at 2 am. They didn’t allow him to enter. But, finally, he managed to enter at 11 am,” Yadav said.
 
Senior Election Commission Official Indra Bhushan Verma told ABP News that the observer cannot interfere in the nomination process. Similarly, Chief Election Commissioner of India OP Rawat also mentioned that “the role of an observer is to observe.”
 
Varanasi District Magistrate Surendra Singh had reportedly told the media that Yadav’s nomination was rejected as it failed to meet Section 9 and 33(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. He had further said that Yadav was unable to submit the necessary certificate issued by EC in the stipulated time.
 
Yadav had alleged that the officials conspired to reject his nomination. He also underlined that the second notice was given to him only after he could furnish the relevant documents when the first notice. Special election observer Kumar’s claims on camera highlight the fact that efforts were made to stop Yadav from contesting the Lok Sabha elections against Modi.
 
The Supreme Court had dismissed Yadav’s plea after he had moved the court against EC’s decision to reject his nomination.
 
It is unclear who motivated the observer to go out of his way to reject Yadav’s nomination but fingers are being pointed at the ruling party. Even though many nominations have been rejected throughout the country, which is usual in any election, this rejection of Tej Bahadur Yadav is been monitored with intense scrutiny as he was to stand against PM Modi. 

More concrete details are awaited in this developing story.

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