Insatiable Seshan

Elections and T.N. Seshan were made for each other. Or, just not made for each other. That depends on how one looks at it but there is no denying the pairing itself. It was as the Chief Election Commissioner that he achieved a celebrity status and it is a couple of elections that represent the peaks of his post-retirement career. But then it was as the CEC that he also acquired a national notoriety. In his days in high office, he distinguished himself less by conducting elections than by countermanding them; and, thereafter, less by contesting elections than by losing them before the casting of the first vote. And by doing so in disdainful disregard of the norms of principled political conduct he had been preaching from the Nirvachan Sadan and other pulpits later. He saw nothing odd, after all that sage wisdom and those smart cracks about the importance of elections, to offer himself as the candidate for Indian Presidency of a party that proudly claims to have no organisational elections at all. The ShivSena's nominee against K.R. Narayanan sees nothing improper now in accepting a Congress ticket for a contest of nearly foregone conclusion against the BJP's L.K. Advani. The switch from Bal Thackeray to the `Bahu' of a party that has been at his receiving end is breathtaking enough. That this comes so soon after Seshan's reported call to the voters to punish the `betrayers' of the Vajpayee regime makes it remarkably brazen even by his own standards.

The entire electoral exercise of the ex-CEC comes, it hardly needs to be recalled, not long after his passionate crusade against politicians per se, which made him a darling of the depoliticised middle class. Parallels can certainly be found, but only after some search, among the cases of professional politicos to Seshan's pursuit of cynicism. Few of these would have feigned political innocence of the kind professed by the bureaucrat who boasted about never having voted before. His reasoning now is simple. To serve the people, you need `a platform' which isprovided by Parliament. To get there, you need a party and, ``with all its shortcomings, the Congress is the best''. QED. The last profound discovery won't surprise anyone with a long enough memory to retrieve images of a loyal Cabinet Secretary running beside Rajiv Gandhi's vehicle in a sterling, if strictly uncalled-for, display of personal concern for prime ministerial security. The anti-establishment record of Seshan is more recent and includes quite a few brushes with erstwhile Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav who coined the `Seshan vs nation' slogan, now a staunch ally of the `best' of parties.

All this is not going to deter so determined a saviour of the nation as Seshan who believes that one-liners are the best solutions to its many problems and that Parliament deserves the brilliance of his wit every bit as much as branches of the Rotary Club. There is a clearer case for his contesting elections, however. As CEC, he was criticised in some uncharitable quarters for taking all the fun andcolour out of elections. By providing such comic relief to the scene of polls and proving that they can be entertaining without being an extravaganza, is he not making some amends?

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