Why does Seshan want to turn our many-splendoured elections into aseptic, decorous, television-and-drawing room bores?

Seshan's standard returns require the candidate to specify how much he spends on his car during the campaign. Fair enough. And easy enough for a candidate to not only add up but even produce matching vouchers for. However, a few columns down, Seshan asks how much the candidate spent on 'public transport' to travel to his 'headquarters'! Panic sets in.

If the candidate has a car, which he confesses to and accounts for, why on earth should he suddenly jump on a bus or a train or a boat to go to his 'headquarters' The candidate's own main office in the constituency? His party district president's abode? The party office in the state capital? Delhi? There is no time or opportunity for clarification. Somebody rummages in his pocket for a bus-ticket (remember bus-tickets tell no lies: they do not bear the traveller's name!) and with relief the candidate fills in an amount matching the rummaged bus-tickets collected: Better to be safe than sound!

Then, there are columns and columns on what a candidate has doled out to his agents and workers. Should this be of any concern to the general public? Long gone are the days when pure idealism fired the party worker and he rushed to the barricades gratis. Your average candidate spends much more of his time persuading his workers to get off their butts and go campaigning than he actually spends reaching out to the people himself. And party workers are a mercenary lot. How much is it worth my while getting off my butt, they ask.

The bargaining goes on through the night -- most nights. If candidates look bleary-eyed at the end of the campaign, it has less to do with the toll taken in persuading recalcitrant voters to vote; much more to do with waiting for dawn to break so that the argument with party workers over money can be brought to a close. I can understand the Election Commission concerning itself with candidates bribing voters. Should cajoling party workers to do their rounds at least desultorily fall in the same category?

Then there is the environmental obsession. What launched Seshan onto the big time was his appointment at the then bureaucratic boondocks of the environment ministry. Then no one took the ministry seriously -- except the prime minister. That prime minister was so overwhelmed by Seshan's zeal that in the next four years Seshan was catapulted from environment to internal security to defence to Cabinet secretary. Ever grateful to the springboard which kick-jumped him to fame (and now, with the Magsaysay Award in his pocket, to fortune) Seshan has infused the preoccupations of the environment ministry into the priority concerns of Nirvachan Sadan. Walls are to be kept clean of posters; graffiti is outlawed; loudspeakers are to be abated.

All very well, but what has this to do with democracy? Once every five years (actually, once every five weeks if we keep experimenting with UF - type governments!), the world's greatest democracy goes to the polls. The percentage of polling is higher than in any other democracy where polling is voluntary. The remotest district in India -- Chhimptuipui at the southern edge of Mizoram bordering Myanmar -- recorded the highest voter turnout of the 1993 state assembly election: over 92 per scent! It is difficult in the United States or the United Kingdom to get much more than half the electorate to exercise their franchise.

Our people throw themselves with abandon into the agony and ecstasy of elections primarily because our colourful, noisy, rumbustious elections are the most intensive lesson in democracy anywhere in the world. It is the Election Commission's job to encourage the participative democrative process; it is not the Election Commission's job to spread the environmental values of Pandara Road.

Why does Seshan want to turn our many-splendoured elections into the aseptic, decorous, television-and-drawing room bore that elections in the West have become? Will his fiats increase voter-participation? Does he really believe Election Commission hoardings urging people to vote do more to bring the voter to the polls than the dialectical war of party posters and wall writings, the tumult and the shouting of the clash of candidates? In any case, is any of this part of the Representation of People's Act?

Seshan has famously complained that his work takes him only half-an-hour is required to prepare speeches for Rotary Clubs. Perhaps the Election Commission would be better advised, instead, to fill their wasted hours rationalising, updating, simplifying and making transparent the thicket of their own babuspeak.