By Kavita Mistry 
He was already on an adulation high. The middle class loved Seshan for his zero tolerance towards the dirt and grime of Indian democracy. He had made it clear that he will not let Bihar play spoiler to the legacy he knew he was going to leave behind. He said it plainly, “Bihar needs that little extra attention because at the end of the day, it should not be said, it was bright everywhere else, but in Bihar we failed.”
As the late journalist Sankarshan Thakur wrote in The Brothers Bihari, as the graveyard for free and fair polls, Bihar was Seshan’s ultimate challenge—one he staked his reputation on.
It was, of course, not hard to see why. In the Badlands of Bihar, booth-capturing, bogus-voting, rigging and violence were par for the course. The state witnessed the death of 24 people in the Lok Sabha elections of 1984, while 40 died in the 1989 Lok Sabha polls. The violence during the assembly elections of 1985 claimed 63 lives and 87 died in the state elections in 1990.
Yet, another blood-stained Bihar election would be a stain on Seshan’s legacy.
If Rahul Gandhi’s allegations against the ECI seem too strident today, they still pale in front of Lalu Prasad’s colourful fulminations. If for Rahul Gandhi today, the ECI is a symbol of institutional perfidy under Modi rule, for Lalu Prasad, thirty years ago, it was a symbol of the entrenched, casteist, elitist establishment, which conspired to throw out a subaltern like him.
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The ‘Seshan Code of Conduct’
To begin with, Seshan ensured paramilitary forces were deployed in strength—as many as 650 companies were sent. The polls postponed four times, and finally staged in four phases. As Thakur wrote, Seshan held “the entire state administration on tenterhooks—the slightest hint of violation of the Seshan code, and he would scrap the entire process.”
It was the longest assembly election in Indian history—the election was notified by the poll panel on 8 December 1994, and the last round of ballot was cast on 28 March 1995. Not only was it a painfully exhausting election for candidates, but one that brought the state administration on the edge.
In a confidential, strongly worded note sent on 23 February 1995, Seshan made a flurry of damning charges against the state government. The state had not made a single conviction in the previous elections even though as many as 8,719 people were reported to have been involved in cases of electoral offences and 950 criminal cases relating to electoral offences were registered, he said.
As on date, he added, 10,600 warrants and challans are lying unserved at different police stations in the state. The state had barely complied with the ECI directions to conduct a 100 percent scrutiny of arms licence-holders. Moreover, the state identified only 17,150, out of the total 82,692 polling booths as ‘sensitive’, a figure, Seshan said, was unreliable.
There was more. While the ECI had directed the government to send a report of the law and order situation in the state in a prescribed format everyday at 8.00 pm, the reports the state government was actually sending were “incomplete, incorrect and irregular”.
Then there was the alleged leakage of top-secret security-related information, statistics and communications from all the districts.
“The EC was especially alarmed when communications regarding critical statistical information—particularly a correspondence between the DGP and the chief secretary regarding the acute shortage of revolvers and bodyguards, and messages, sent by the district magistrates of Katihar, Giridih and Palamau, regarding a similar shortfall—appeared in a news item in Jansatta, dated February 19,” an India Today report of the time quoted the letter as saying.
Seshan’s charges were not unsubstantiated. In a confidential letter to a top police official, K.P. Ramaiah, the district election officer-cum-deputy commissioner of Palamau, wrote of the Maoist Communist Centre’s (MCC) threat to boycott the polls by unleashing violence in his district.
“I expect there will be large-scale violence, bloodshed and poll boycott, to the extent of 50 per cent. I have already reported this several times earlier to the departments concerned, but the response to my signals or reports is insufficient. Hence, I request you to give me sufficient forces to deal with the abnormal situation,” the officer said.
Seshan would never yield to a threat of violence.
He would summon or dismiss officials at the hint of any deviation from the code of conduct. In March, he insisted on the replacement of several high-ranking state officials in the middle of the elections. DGP V.P. Jain and home commissioner J.L. Arya were replaced on the grounds of lack of coordination. Seshan also called Bihar chief secretary A.K. Basak “thoroughly unfit”. Gaya district magistrate and superintendent of police were also suspended.
He didn’t stop at postponing elections or suspending officials. On March 10, Seshan banned the telecast of election analyses programmes from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Orissa because he argued that they could prejudice voters in Bihar. Seshan had called the Bihar election his “toughest examination”. And he was going to go to any length to pass it.
‘Will tie up raging bull’
Lalu was furious, at least publicly, at the postponement of the elections. He was not worried about the opposition. It was Seshan who worried him. “This scourge is meant to ensure people vote, but he is going on postponing their opportunities to vote,” he said.
For Lalu, Seshan represented the sahebdom he had sought to vanquish. For him, the Congress, the BJP and Seshan all were symbols of the upper-caste hegemony he set out to break.
The ailing former prime minister, V.P. Singh, too arrived in Bihar after the third postponement of the election, and said, “There is in Bihar, a definite and determined effort to subvert Mandal and bring back the old exploitative order.”
With the persistent shadow of the President’s Rule given the frequent postponements, Singh said, “It is a clever move by Seshan and his BJP-Congress(I) allies to foist President’s Rule on the state.”
The Janata Dal also went to the apex court to challenge the third postponement of elections. But their petition was dismissed on the grounds that the situation in the state was “extraordinary”.
Lalu’s threats to Seshan were, of course, characteristically colourful. “Seshan pagla saand jaise kar raha hai, maalome nahi hai ki hum rassa bandh ke khataal mein band kar sakte hain (Seshan is behaving like a raging bull. He does not know I can tame and tie him up and lock him among the cows in my shed),” he once thundered.
When asked about Seshan’s misgivings about the law and order situation in the state, Lalu said: “Vidhi vyavastha nahin. kuchh logon ka buddhi vyavastha kharab hai.” (There’s nothing wrong with law and order, what’s wrong is the mental state of some people).
When Seshan postponed the election for the fourth time, Lalu phoned Bihar’s chief electoral officer, R.J.M. Pillai. “Ei ji Pillai, hum tumhra chief minister hain aur tum humra afsar, ee Seshanwa kahan se beech mein tapakta rahta hai…Aur fax message bhejta hai! Ee amir log ka khilaona le kar ke tum log garib log ke khilaaf conspiracy karte ho. Sab fax-foox uda denge, election ho jaane do.”
“Hey Mr Pillai, I am your chief minister and you are my officer. Where does this Seshan keep coming from between us… and send faxes. You guys use the tools of the rich to hatch conspiracies against the poor. I will destroy all your faxes, let the elections get over.)
Soon, however, voices of agitation against Seshan’s cast-iron ways began emerging from other quarters too. Candidates were beginning to get exhausted. Election fatigue set in among voters. For the cash-strapped state government, the long election was proving to be a costly affair.
It had to cough up over Rs 100 crore for the deployment of paramilitary forces. Further, according to the Bihar Chamber of Commerce (BCC), the government was losing Rs 3 crore a day since January to March is a crucial period for tax-collection.
Yet, for Seshan, all else mattered little. His goal could not be compromised by these distractions. The 1995 elections were conducted exactly the way Seshan wanted. Yet, Lalu swept the polls. For him, his victory was a defeat of the establishment, of which Seshan was a part. But if for Seshan, protecting his legacy was the goal, he had achieved it.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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