While the last phase of the general elections is to conclude on 19 May 2019 and with the possibility of a hung-parliament looming large, there is one party which has already lost the elections and also the trust of the people -the Election Commission of India, er The Election Omission of India. 

It is not surprising that on the eve of the conclusion of the elections, India’s Prime Minister has congratulated the Election Commission of India for the success of the elections, calling it the Festival of Democracy. For those who may have missed, the Election Commission had officially publicised the general elections 2019 as the Maha Tyohar -the Big Festival.

The festival was actually a tamasha -of money, manpower, muscle power, lung power, misuse of authority, muzzling of facts, media management, media control, mayhem and monstrosity of a majoritarian system.

From West Bengal to Uttar Pradesh, from Punjab to Mumbai, the ECI adopted an extremely selective approach, maintained a stupified silence on dissenting notes by one of the three Election Commissioners and intervened where it was not required to and where it was required, it chose to look the other way.

The various clean chits to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP chief Amit Shah will go down in history as acts of Omission by the supreme election authority. In Punjab, the removal of a senior police officer from an ongoing probe of blasphemy and sacrilege at the behest of a pro-BJP Shiromani Akali Dal, the pro-BJP stand in West Bengal by selectively using powers under Section 324, the permission to the likes of extremist Pragya Thakur to continue their venomous campaign are but few glaring examples of the acts of omission of the Election Commission of India.

The Model Code of Conduct is a toothless document which has been held more in the breach than in practice by the smallest player to the biggest political party leaders and their candidates. Though this has generally been the case in all elections, this time around, electioneering has reached a nadir where political opponents of the ruling party have called the Model Code of Conduct as the Modi Code of Misconduct.

From the manner in which the elections have been conducted and the way things have been omitted, in this election, for the World Sikh News, the Election Commission of India has degenerated into The Election Omission of India.