may 19th, 2012 CEthis is written in a rather stilted way with often-hilarious 'explanations' of indian terms (eh, narasimhan, who do you think your audience is, white guys?) and atrocities like 'adi shankar, founder of the kanchi mutt (shankar? you dipweed, the name is sankara! 'shankar' would be an urdu-ization! and founder of kanchi mutt? adi sankara founded all the other four famous mutts in sringeri, dwaraka, puri and jyotirmath, and it is a contested historical fact whether he indeed founded the one in kanchi). maybe narasimhan is from the n. ram stable of deracinated, ignorant, self-hating, china-loving tambrahms. nevertheless an interesting story on t n seshan, although it doesn't really seem to have any point. yes, the narrative is good.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: sri
Date: Mon, May 14, 2012 at 4:30 AM
Subject: Inspiration: Revisiting TN Seshan The Once Irrepressible, Arrogant Election Commissioner
To:
'The more you kick me...'
T E Narasimhan / May 12, 2012, 00:32 IST http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/039the-more-you-kick-me039/474095/
Ignoring threats and entrenched interests, the admired and
controversial T N Seshan helped clean up India’s elections. T E
Narasimhan meets the changemaker in retirement It is with some trepidation that I walk into T N Seshan’s house on St
Mary’s Road in Chennai. It is called Narayaneeyam, which is the title
of a medieval text composed by Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri, a
Sanskrit poet of Kerala. Seshan is the no-nonsense former cabinet
secretary and chief election commissioner; he also won the Ramon
Magsaysay Award for Government Service in 1996. He is credited with
having helped clean up Indian elections — and is, perhaps not
surprisingly, known to have a short fuse.
Seshan's office wanted the list of questions ahead of our meeting, and
informed me that he would not answer questions on national politics,
nor discuss any issue outside the original list of questions.
So I reach his house 15 minutes early. Unlike the other residences in
this upmarket neighbourhood, Narayaneeyam, where Seshan lives with his
wife Jaya, is built in the Kerala style. A sparkling-clean car stands
in the driveway. There is a small garden and a verandah. A Ganesha
idol rests on the floor, and a picture of Ganesha above the main door.
A CCTV camera keeps an eye on visitors. From the foyer a staircase leads up to the living room and library. At
the stroke of 3 pm, I am let into the visitor's room on the ground
floor. Seshan, who will turn 80 next week, is dressed in a half-sleeve
brown shirt and veshti, the kind of dhoti worn by Brahmins. He has put
on weight since he was last in the news. The room is serene; the only noise is the rumble of an old
air-conditioner. Where he sits, within arm's reach are two remote
controls and a cordless phone. On display behind him, and also around
the television set placed in front of him, are the various accolades
and souvenirs he has received. In one corner is an idol of Ganesha; in
another, an automatic foot massager. To one side is a shelf with
audiocassettes and a cassette player. He offers a drink of buttermilk. In spite of the repressive “advisory” of his office, Seshan speaks
freely. He has aged since his government days, but still speaks with
his famous conviction. Not once does his memory falter. * * * Tinnellai Narayana Iyer Seshan is best remembered as the man who
cleaned up Indian elections. To the public he was a hero. And he
revelled in that status. A Delhi journalist who watched Seshan conduct
a “town hall” meeting in those days remembers that he handled the
audience with great skill. Dressed in a loose kurta and pyjama, he was
direct and crisp, and impatient with long-winded questions. His punch
line for the evening was: “Tu cheez badi hai bhrasht bhrasht” (“You
are very corrupt-corrupt,” a take on a then-popular film song). Another journalist remembers Seshan’s informal monthly get-togethers
when he was the cabinet secretary (the country’s top bureaucrat). He
once asked a secretary to furnish some information to journalists the
very next day, although it was a Sunday. He relented only when the
secretary remonstrated. His detractors called him authoritarian,
egotistic, eccentric and publicity-hungry. Sixteen years after he left the Election Commission in 1996, Seshan
lives a quiet life. He devotes most of his time to the Internet, and
to his library of over 1,000 books. The library upstairs, which he
invites me to see, contains an eclectic mix of books on philosophy,
politics, history, economics and Shakespeare. He says he is currently reading the Vivekachudamani, a long Sanskrit
poem composed by Adi Shankar, founder of the Kanchi Mutt. The poem is
in the form of dialogue between a master and his disciple, where the
master explains nature and the atman (the self, in Hindu philosophy).
It should be noted that Seshan was attached with the Mutt when it was
run by Jagadguru Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal (1894-1994). He
also follows Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sai Baba and Amritanandamayi Devi,
though he says he is not “over-attached”. Seshan is on the faculty of the Great Lakes Institute of Management in
Chennai, where he teaches leadership. He had been asked to lecture
bureaucrats-in-the-making at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy in
Mussoorie, but his frankness ensured the stint was short. “When I took
the first batch, my first remark for the students was, ‘A paanwala
will earn more than what you earn.’ I was being both brutal and fair.”
Seshan had, in the past, set up the Deshbhakt (Patriot) Trust with
like-minded people for social reforms. Now, however, he “only spends
time at the Great Lakes Institute and at home”. On the hard disk of his computer rests Seshan's autobiography. "I have
written my autobiography and it is ready. But I am not planning to
publish it since it will hurt many people. I wrote it just for my
satisfaction,” he says. * * * Seshan was the youngest of six siblings in a middle-class family. His
father was a lawyer in the district court. “My father came up the hard
way,” he says. “During our childhood, we were not denied our needs,
but we didn't live in luxury.” His mother once beat him for spending 4
annas (25 paise) on food in a restaurant without permission. “There
are certain lessons you learn from your childhood. It is not that we
shouldn’t spend money, but that we shouldn’t spend blindly. This
incident helped me to be a clean-handed person in my career. You will
not find even one single wrong rupee in my account. Money was not
wrongly spent, be it public or personal. I lived with the principle of
integrity, absolutely fearless.” Seshan went to school in Kerala, then studied science at Madras
Christian College in Chennai, where he says he won a gold medal for
outstanding performance — but at the cost of his social life. He was a
bookworm, in the college “hostel morning, evening and night”. With few job opportunities in the early 1950s for young scientists,
Seshan became a lecturer in the same college at 19. He left in 1953
because the monthly salary was a paltry Rs 180. He decided to make a
career in the civil services, and topped the police examination in
1953. “I did not take up police service," he says, “because I would
have had to deal with criminals all the time and eventually would have
become hard-hearted.” In 1955, he topped the IAS entrance exam and
began his long journey as a bureaucrat. Seshan started in Tamil Nadu and then moved round the country before
arriving in Delhi. Despite the prominence of his later positions, he
counts his time as director of transport for Madras as one of his most
memorable assignments. There he managed 3,000 buses and 40,000 staff.
One of the bus drivers once asked Seshan how he would grasp drivers’
problems when he did not understood bus engines or know how to drive a
bus. Seshan took this as a challenge and not only learnt to drive but
also spent long hours at the workshop. “I could dismantle engines and
put them back and drive the bus also,” he says. Once he stopped a
driver in the middle of the road, took the wheel and drove the bus,
full of passengers, for 80 km! * * * But the assignment most Indians will remember Seshan for is chief
election commissioner. He was chosen by the then prime minister,
Chandra Shekhar. According to Seshan, the then law minister, Janata
Party leader Subramanian Swamy, played a vital role in the
appointment, for which Seshan says he is still grateful. His
association with Swamy goes back to Harvard University, where the
government had sent Seshan to do a course in public administration,
and Swamy was then teaching. “I assumed the office when I didn’t know the rules and how the
Election Commission operates," says Seshan. "I had never conducted an
election. I went with two principles: zero delay and zero deficiency.”
During his early days on the job, Seshan identified over 100 common
electoral malpractices, including the preparation of inaccurate
election rolls, mistakes in setting up polling stations, coercive
electioneering, spending more than the legal limit, using goons to
snatch polling booths and general abuse of authority. The challenges
were enormous, but Seshan says they didn’t intimidate him. “I am like
a ball. The more you kick me, the more I will bounce back.” The
cleanup began with his own office. Long lunch breaks were banned, and
tennis and library during office hours was brought to an end. It was Seshan who began issuing identity cards to voters. “We [the
Election Commission] wanted to issue photo identification cards to all
legal voters," he says. "The politicians bitterly protested this move,
claiming that it was unnecessary and expensive.” After waiting nearly
18 months for the government to act, Seshan announced that if voter
identity cards were not issued, no elections would be held after
January 1, 1995. A number of elections were, in fact, postponed for
this reason. The Supreme Court eventually interceded and ruled that
since voting was an inherent right of citizens, it could not be
postponed indefinitely because voters lacked identity cards. Even so,
Seshan's insistence led the government to start issuing identity
cards. By 1996, Seshan's last year on the job, 2 million voters had ID
cards. The other reform related to election expenses, ostentatious campaign
displays and residency requirements. Seshan instituted the practice of
using election observers, who were senior officers of the National Tax
Bureau. He also implemented Section 77 of the Representation of the
People Act of 1951, which made it obligatory for candidates to keep an
accurate account of their expenditure and set a ceiling on the amount
they could spend on their campaign. During the 1993 Lok Sabha elections, Seshan monitored electoral
expenses round the clock from a control room at the Election
Commission headquarters. One of his officers was assigned to each
state. Altogether, according to reports, 1,488 candidates for Lok
Sabha were disqualified for three years because they failed to submit
an account of their expenses. It was reported that Seshan reviewed
more than 40,000 alleged cases of false election returns and
disqualified 14,000 potential candidates from public office. He was
impervious to the demands of politicians; so much so that in 1992,
when the Commission under him cancelled elections in Bihar and Punjab,
some politicians tried to have him impeached. “It was not that I introduced a new reform in the system," says
Seshan. "In fact, I didn’t even add one comma, semicolon or a full
stop to the Act. Whatever was said in the Act, I implemented." Notwithstanding my original trepidation, and despite his fearsome
reputation, Seshan is not curt, arrogant or bitter.
From: sri
Date: Mon, May 14, 2012 at 4:30 AM
Subject: Inspiration: Revisiting TN Seshan The Once Irrepressible, Arrogant Election Commissioner
To:
'The more you kick me...'
T E Narasimhan / May 12, 2012, 00:32 IST http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/039the-more-you-kick-me039/474095/
Ignoring threats and entrenched interests, the admired and
controversial T N Seshan helped clean up India’s elections. T E
Narasimhan meets the changemaker in retirement It is with some trepidation that I walk into T N Seshan’s house on St
Mary’s Road in Chennai. It is called Narayaneeyam, which is the title
of a medieval text composed by Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri, a
Sanskrit poet of Kerala. Seshan is the no-nonsense former cabinet
secretary and chief election commissioner; he also won the Ramon
Magsaysay Award for Government Service in 1996. He is credited with
having helped clean up Indian elections — and is, perhaps not
surprisingly, known to have a short fuse.
Seshan's office wanted the list of questions ahead of our meeting, and
informed me that he would not answer questions on national politics,
nor discuss any issue outside the original list of questions.
So I reach his house 15 minutes early. Unlike the other residences in
this upmarket neighbourhood, Narayaneeyam, where Seshan lives with his
wife Jaya, is built in the Kerala style. A sparkling-clean car stands
in the driveway. There is a small garden and a verandah. A Ganesha
idol rests on the floor, and a picture of Ganesha above the main door.
A CCTV camera keeps an eye on visitors. From the foyer a staircase leads up to the living room and library. At
the stroke of 3 pm, I am let into the visitor's room on the ground
floor. Seshan, who will turn 80 next week, is dressed in a half-sleeve
brown shirt and veshti, the kind of dhoti worn by Brahmins. He has put
on weight since he was last in the news. The room is serene; the only noise is the rumble of an old
air-conditioner. Where he sits, within arm's reach are two remote
controls and a cordless phone. On display behind him, and also around
the television set placed in front of him, are the various accolades
and souvenirs he has received. In one corner is an idol of Ganesha; in
another, an automatic foot massager. To one side is a shelf with
audiocassettes and a cassette player. He offers a drink of buttermilk. In spite of the repressive “advisory” of his office, Seshan speaks
freely. He has aged since his government days, but still speaks with
his famous conviction. Not once does his memory falter. * * * Tinnellai Narayana Iyer Seshan is best remembered as the man who
cleaned up Indian elections. To the public he was a hero. And he
revelled in that status. A Delhi journalist who watched Seshan conduct
a “town hall” meeting in those days remembers that he handled the
audience with great skill. Dressed in a loose kurta and pyjama, he was
direct and crisp, and impatient with long-winded questions. His punch
line for the evening was: “Tu cheez badi hai bhrasht bhrasht” (“You
are very corrupt-corrupt,” a take on a then-popular film song). Another journalist remembers Seshan’s informal monthly get-togethers
when he was the cabinet secretary (the country’s top bureaucrat). He
once asked a secretary to furnish some information to journalists the
very next day, although it was a Sunday. He relented only when the
secretary remonstrated. His detractors called him authoritarian,
egotistic, eccentric and publicity-hungry. Sixteen years after he left the Election Commission in 1996, Seshan
lives a quiet life. He devotes most of his time to the Internet, and
to his library of over 1,000 books. The library upstairs, which he
invites me to see, contains an eclectic mix of books on philosophy,
politics, history, economics and Shakespeare. He says he is currently reading the Vivekachudamani, a long Sanskrit
poem composed by Adi Shankar, founder of the Kanchi Mutt. The poem is
in the form of dialogue between a master and his disciple, where the
master explains nature and the atman (the self, in Hindu philosophy).
It should be noted that Seshan was attached with the Mutt when it was
run by Jagadguru Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal (1894-1994). He
also follows Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sai Baba and Amritanandamayi Devi,
though he says he is not “over-attached”. Seshan is on the faculty of the Great Lakes Institute of Management in
Chennai, where he teaches leadership. He had been asked to lecture
bureaucrats-in-the-making at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy in
Mussoorie, but his frankness ensured the stint was short. “When I took
the first batch, my first remark for the students was, ‘A paanwala
will earn more than what you earn.’ I was being both brutal and fair.”
Seshan had, in the past, set up the Deshbhakt (Patriot) Trust with
like-minded people for social reforms. Now, however, he “only spends
time at the Great Lakes Institute and at home”. On the hard disk of his computer rests Seshan's autobiography. "I have
written my autobiography and it is ready. But I am not planning to
publish it since it will hurt many people. I wrote it just for my
satisfaction,” he says. * * * Seshan was the youngest of six siblings in a middle-class family. His
father was a lawyer in the district court. “My father came up the hard
way,” he says. “During our childhood, we were not denied our needs,
but we didn't live in luxury.” His mother once beat him for spending 4
annas (25 paise) on food in a restaurant without permission. “There
are certain lessons you learn from your childhood. It is not that we
shouldn’t spend money, but that we shouldn’t spend blindly. This
incident helped me to be a clean-handed person in my career. You will
not find even one single wrong rupee in my account. Money was not
wrongly spent, be it public or personal. I lived with the principle of
integrity, absolutely fearless.” Seshan went to school in Kerala, then studied science at Madras
Christian College in Chennai, where he says he won a gold medal for
outstanding performance — but at the cost of his social life. He was a
bookworm, in the college “hostel morning, evening and night”. With few job opportunities in the early 1950s for young scientists,
Seshan became a lecturer in the same college at 19. He left in 1953
because the monthly salary was a paltry Rs 180. He decided to make a
career in the civil services, and topped the police examination in
1953. “I did not take up police service," he says, “because I would
have had to deal with criminals all the time and eventually would have
become hard-hearted.” In 1955, he topped the IAS entrance exam and
began his long journey as a bureaucrat. Seshan started in Tamil Nadu and then moved round the country before
arriving in Delhi. Despite the prominence of his later positions, he
counts his time as director of transport for Madras as one of his most
memorable assignments. There he managed 3,000 buses and 40,000 staff.
One of the bus drivers once asked Seshan how he would grasp drivers’
problems when he did not understood bus engines or know how to drive a
bus. Seshan took this as a challenge and not only learnt to drive but
also spent long hours at the workshop. “I could dismantle engines and
put them back and drive the bus also,” he says. Once he stopped a
driver in the middle of the road, took the wheel and drove the bus,
full of passengers, for 80 km! * * * But the assignment most Indians will remember Seshan for is chief
election commissioner. He was chosen by the then prime minister,
Chandra Shekhar. According to Seshan, the then law minister, Janata
Party leader Subramanian Swamy, played a vital role in the
appointment, for which Seshan says he is still grateful. His
association with Swamy goes back to Harvard University, where the
government had sent Seshan to do a course in public administration,
and Swamy was then teaching. “I assumed the office when I didn’t know the rules and how the
Election Commission operates," says Seshan. "I had never conducted an
election. I went with two principles: zero delay and zero deficiency.”
During his early days on the job, Seshan identified over 100 common
electoral malpractices, including the preparation of inaccurate
election rolls, mistakes in setting up polling stations, coercive
electioneering, spending more than the legal limit, using goons to
snatch polling booths and general abuse of authority. The challenges
were enormous, but Seshan says they didn’t intimidate him. “I am like
a ball. The more you kick me, the more I will bounce back.” The
cleanup began with his own office. Long lunch breaks were banned, and
tennis and library during office hours was brought to an end. It was Seshan who began issuing identity cards to voters. “We [the
Election Commission] wanted to issue photo identification cards to all
legal voters," he says. "The politicians bitterly protested this move,
claiming that it was unnecessary and expensive.” After waiting nearly
18 months for the government to act, Seshan announced that if voter
identity cards were not issued, no elections would be held after
January 1, 1995. A number of elections were, in fact, postponed for
this reason. The Supreme Court eventually interceded and ruled that
since voting was an inherent right of citizens, it could not be
postponed indefinitely because voters lacked identity cards. Even so,
Seshan's insistence led the government to start issuing identity
cards. By 1996, Seshan's last year on the job, 2 million voters had ID
cards. The other reform related to election expenses, ostentatious campaign
displays and residency requirements. Seshan instituted the practice of
using election observers, who were senior officers of the National Tax
Bureau. He also implemented Section 77 of the Representation of the
People Act of 1951, which made it obligatory for candidates to keep an
accurate account of their expenditure and set a ceiling on the amount
they could spend on their campaign. During the 1993 Lok Sabha elections, Seshan monitored electoral
expenses round the clock from a control room at the Election
Commission headquarters. One of his officers was assigned to each
state. Altogether, according to reports, 1,488 candidates for Lok
Sabha were disqualified for three years because they failed to submit
an account of their expenses. It was reported that Seshan reviewed
more than 40,000 alleged cases of false election returns and
disqualified 14,000 potential candidates from public office. He was
impervious to the demands of politicians; so much so that in 1992,
when the Commission under him cancelled elections in Bihar and Punjab,
some politicians tried to have him impeached. “It was not that I introduced a new reform in the system," says
Seshan. "In fact, I didn’t even add one comma, semicolon or a full
stop to the Act. Whatever was said in the Act, I implemented." Notwithstanding my original trepidation, and despite his fearsome
reputation, Seshan is not curt, arrogant or bitter.
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