Election Umpire Calls Them as He Sees Them : Shyness isn’t a problem for India’s T. N. Seshan, who is proud of driving ‘the fear of God’ into law-breakers.

India’s mandarin-like civil servants? No better than “polished call girls.”

His own baldness? “God made some heads beautiful. The others he covered with hair.”

It’s virtually certain that if you live outside India, you’ve never heard of T. N. Seshan. But if you reside here, you simply can’t ignore his outspoken, often outrageous views. For three years, the bull-necked career bureaucrat with the gleaming toffee-hued dome has served as India’s chief election commissioner.

His biggest accomplishment? “I have driven the fear of God into people who broke the system,” he says proudly.

In the world’s single largest democracy--so huge that a nationwide election mobilizes 550 million voters and more than 350 registered parties, generates 20,000 tons of paper ballots and requires 700,000 polling booths and an army of 3 million to 4.5 million poll workers--Seshan is the self-defined “umpire.”

“The Indian election system is one of the greatest marvels of the world, after the Taj Mahal,” he has mused. So how’s the umpire doing?

If controversy is the measure, he’s doing well indeed. For in the past year, though Seshan commands a full-time staff of only 192, he arguably became the most important, and certainly the most exasperating and hotly debated, figure in Indian public life.

The New Delhi building that houses the Election Commission is now guarded by a squad of soldiers armed with automatics, and its bulky 60-year-old master is chauffeured around in a limo armored to stop a 5.6-millimeter bullet fired from a yard away.

*

To understand the danger, it’s important to realize that intimidating violence, ballot-box stuffing and official manipulation of results used to be as much a part of elections in India as the ritual garland of bright yellow marigolds for the victor.

But that was before the “Seshan factor’ kicked in.

Two months ago, 143 million people across northern India were called to the polls to choose their local assemblies. The Times of India approvingly observed that for the first time in years, “the electoral process in five major states was conducted without officially inspired rigging and malpractices.”

In Uttar Pradesh, a state particularly notorious for election shenanigans and bullying, there were only two murders. In 1991, there had been more than 190.

What did Seshan do? “In U. P., I had 40,000 central policemen all over the place,” he confides. That virtually ended the usual intimidation of voters, and as a result a coalition came to power that favors the disadvantaged.

Although the job he holds is mandated by the constitution, chief election commissioners before Seshan were little more than glorified errand boys for the government, which manipulated the electoral process to further its grip on power. Seshan refuses to do what people working for Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao order.

“If I am a subordinate of government, God save this country’s elections,” he says.

Subordinate is a word few would apply to Seshan, although he is a 36-year veteran of India’s prestigious civil service--the same bunch he now claims is “98% corrupt” and likens to prostitutes. He held a succession of plum government jobs and even served nine months as Cabinet secretary, or India’s No. 1 bureaucrat.

Critics carp that if Seshan had complaints about public administration, he certainly kept quiet for a self-servingly long time. Bhuvnesh Chaturvedi, a member of Parliament for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, says Seshan’s headline-grabbing comments are those of an “abnormal man.”

For almost a year, Seshan and India’s government have been waging a dispute so acrimonious that the commissioner is boycotting all official functions. In a nutshell, the government rejects Seshan’s contention that he has the constitutional authority to order its staff to run and keep order at elections and that he can punish bureaucrats who won’t comply. “That is something I was not willing to stomach,” Seshan says.

He struck back last August by postponing all elections. The Supreme Court then gave him the interim powers he sought.

Taking a leaf from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notebook, Rao’s government moved to dilute Seshan’s authority by appointing two additional commissioners. But Seshan, who as commission chief enjoys special status conferred by the constitution, is uncowed.

“The only way you can send me home is by going through the process of impeachment,” he says.

He now is going after 20 members of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, for allegedly falsifying their places of residence so they could get elected from states they don’t live in. If those allegations are true, Seshan wants charges brought.

It’s hardly a move that will earn him brownie points with India’s already alienated government--one of the probe targets is Finance Minister Manmohan Singh.

*

Seshan wants photo identity cards for voters introduced by Jan. 1 of next year--a laudable undertaking to cleanse often suspect voter rolls of the dead and departed, but dauntingly ambitious given the size of the electorate and the fact that millions of Indians have no fixed address and sleep on the streets.

Rarely out of the headlines, Seshan in the past few weeks has ordered political parties to remove the posters and graffiti from the last election and has banned the licensing of new firearms during campaigns.

Bare-chested and armed with a constable’s iron-tipped lathi, or stave, he robustly kept order at the January funeral of a Hindu holy man, barking orders at policemen and using his beefy torso to block entry to the press.

A scandal threatened to engulf the “Mr. Clean” of Indian politics when it became known that Seshan flew to the funeral aboard a jet he requisitioned from a leading industrialist. But Seshan said he had paid for the flight, and produced the photocopy of a $3,000 personal check he wrote.

Most significantly, in a 12-page order, Seshan has directed district election officers throughout the country to scrutinize candidates’ campaign spending. For a typical parliamentary seat, spending is supposed to be limited to 200,000 rupees, or about $6,500.

In real life, he says, candidates shell out up to 80 million rupees, or almost $2.6 million.

“I can’t get rid of them by saying they’ve spent more money,” Seshan admits. “But I intend to expose them.”

It is the source of that bankroll--official corruption--that really preoccupies Seshan and gets him worrying about the future of Indian democracy. Corruption, he says, is endemic because almost every big purchase or decision involves politicians or government officials who can skim money off contracts or demand kickbacks.

“You can buy a condom from X instead of Y in the United States,” Seshan says with his usual flair for the outrageous. “If you want a condom in India, you have to largely buy from the public sector.”

What has evolved in his country, Seshan explains, is a three-sided, incestuous process. First, elections serve as the source of power. Through corruption, an officeholder can then accumulate “black money.” He can then use his stash to finance reelection.

And so on, ad infinitum.

“We don’t seem to have a way to break this triangle,” Seshan complains. But he’s striking where the triangular process begins--elections--to enforce spending limits and try to minimize incumbents’ use of the perks of office while campaigning.

The governor of Himachal Pradesh learned the hard way that Seshan was serious. He borrowed an official car to campaign for his son, Seshan says. The commissioner roundly condemned the father and announced he was delaying local elections for three months. Two days later, the governor was replaced.

Ironically, India’s chief election commissioner does not vote himself--he believes it would harm his impartiality.

Once, he says, when he worked for India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission, he did try. “The man read through the list and said, ‘Yes, name correct, yes, address correct, yes, age correct,’ ” Seshan recalled. “And then he said, ‘But this list says you’re a female.’ ”

Seshan went home.

Biography

Name: T. N. Seshan

Title: Chief election commissioner of India.

Age: 60

Personal: Born in Kerala, south India. Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics, University of Madras. Master’s in public administration, Harvard University. Lecturer in physics. Thirty-six years of government service, including ministries of Atomic Energy, Space, Defense and Environment, and Planning Commission. Cabinet secretary, the highest-ranking civil servant, in 1989. Hobbies include astrology and listening to Indian sacred music. Married. No children.

Quote: “God made some heads beautiful. The others he covered with hair.”