Has Congress forgotten about Navin Chawla?

In January 2009, the then Chief Election Commissioner, N. Gopalaswami sought the removal of Election Commissioner Navin Chawla from the Commission, accusing him of favouritism towards the Congress.

To gain a proper perspective on current events, it is sometimes necessary to look back and unravel the events of the past. The present controversy surrounding the Election Commission of India—portrayed by major news outlets and political parties as an apocalyptic catastrophe and an assault on our electoral democracy—compels me to revisit an earlier controversy, one that arguably did great damage to the Commission’s credibility as a neutral and impartial institution.

In January 2009, the then Chief Election Commissioner, N. Gopalaswami, stirred up a hornets’ nest when he sought the removal of Election Commissioner Navin Chawla from the Commission, accusing him of favouritism towards the Congress Party.

Gopalaswami made his case in a two-page letter to the President of India, supported by 12 specific instances detailed in a 24-page report. Attached to the report were a further 800 pages of the Commission’s minutes and internal memoranda. The sheer volume and specificity of this documentation suggest that the allegations were neither cursory nor flimsy. They were not based on isolated snippets from office memoranda or indirect inferences, as is being alleged in the present controversy, but constituted a formal and direct complaint supported by extensive documentary material.

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According to the report, the CEC alleged that Chawla had developed a distinct modus operandi. During crucial meetings, Chawla would allegedly take frequent washroom breaks to communicate the Commission’s deliberations to Congress leaders in real time. Gopalaswami claimed that, as a consequence, he would sometimes receive calls from senior Congress leaders while the meeting was still in progress, objecting to proposed decisions and effectively seeking to influence or interfere with the Commission’s proceedings.