Some commentators think this government suffers from policy paralysis. Nothing can be farther from truth. The UPA government is working pretty efficiently. It’s a different matter that its initiatives are in the patently wrong directions when not altogether dangerous. Consider NCTC. Or consider the proposal to give a legal backing to the model of code of conduct for electioneering.

A group of ministers under Pranab Mukherjee is slated to take up the proposal to give statutory backing to the model of code of conduct or MCC. [Also read: Killing the Election Umpire] The argument in favour of the proposal goes like this: the EC oversees that all candidates and political parties do their campaign within a lakshman rekha of sorts drawn by the model code, but every election witnesses alleged or confirmed instances of violations, especially from the ruling parties. In such cases, EC’s word is final. But, and here is the crucial point, there is no legal or statutory backing for the MCC. Now, can there be any argument against putting something down in the law – in this case, in the Representation of Peoples Act (RPA)? It will remove discretionary element, if any, in the ruling.

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Does the code of conduct need legal backing?

This is the argument forwarded by Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari while reacting to EC’s notice to Salman Khurshid, the law minister should have known better when promising quotas to the Muslims. His cabinet colleague was Beni Prasad Verma was to soon repeat the same MCC violation.

If Khurshid, Verma and others of the ilk had remained within the lakshman rekha, the Congress might not have come up with the idea of supposedly giving legal teeth to the MCC.

Because the ‘statutory backing to MCC’ is a red herring. On one hand, several provisions of the code are part of the RP Act itself. As for the rest, senior EC officials Governance Now have been talking to have pleaded against opening the MCC to court trials.

Imagine if the MCC was part of the law. What would have happened to Khurshid and Verma? They would have gone to court, while making all sorts of statements hinting more promises to their vote bank. The court, of course, could not have delivered its judgment within days – by which time the next phase of elections would have been over, votes pocketed. Meanwhile, the EC too would be wasting its resources on these legal battles.

Not only this scheme of things would not serve any purpose, more importantly, it would provoke our wily politicians to break the MCC with more impunity.

Instead, as it stands today, the MCC has backing of the moral force. The EC officials took pains to stress that it is the shaming of a politician before the people which makes MCC strong enough to deliver.

At the time of writing, Khurshid has been telling the news TV channels that there is no proposal of legalising MCC on the immediate agenda though the government would like a wider debate on electoral reforms after the five assembly polls. In another words, the weak government is rolling it back. Just as it has happened at least twice in the 1990s when the relevant amendment to the RP Act had even made it to the Lok Sabha.

As for the wider debate, chief election commissioner SY Quraishi too has called for electoral reforms in an interview with Governance Now. We have carried a six-part series, by Jagdeep Chhokar, a founding member of the Association for Democratic Reforms, setting out the detailed agenda for such a debate. We look forward to it.

How did the MCC evolve? What EC insiders have to say on the legal-backing proposal? Read more in the next issue of Governance Now