On Saturday, Chief Election Commissioner OP Rawat said the present set of laws are inadequate to tackle these threats.
The Election Commission finds black money, data theft, data harvesting and fake news as a potent threat to the electoral process in India. Most worrying factor for the EC is lack of laws to deal with such threats with an iron fist. On Saturday, Chief Election Commissioner OP Rawat said the present set of laws are inadequate to tackle these threats. He also said that Cambridge Analytica-like machinations of data theft pose a serious threat to the election process.
Speaking on 'Challenges to India's electoral democracy', organised by the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Delhi, Rawat said democracy does not run on whims and it requires traits such as courage, character, integrity and knowledge that are diminishing and are on the verge of extinction in the country.
He explained that clean elections are like a "wellspring of legitimacy" for the leadership and the people of the country and if this was contaminated by such issues, the common man becomes cynical about the entire system.
"With the rise of fake news, with the rise of make-believe things, with the rise of all kind of machinations like data theft, data harvesting, profiling, targeted communication affecting not only communication but referendum world over and changing the outcome of any process which is meant to translate popular will in (taking) a healthy decision, in (choosing) a healthy representative government. That's the potent threat every democracy in the world is facing," Rawat said.
He further pointed out that the commission is seized of issues such as cybersecurity, securing our data so that Cambridge Analytica kind of things do not happen over elections, about misuse and abuse of social media platforms, about fake news, about all kinds of ills.
Specifically talking about the use of money power during polls, he said current laws were not of much help for them to ensure a complete check at this abuse and that is why "state funding" of polls was not possible in India at present.
"Abuse of money is the main concern for India and in Indian elections. There has been a lot of talk for bringing about transparency in campaign finance, even people talk about state funding. But, whatever legal framework is available as on date today, is not adequate to address this issue. And therefore, the commission has been suggesting a number of reforms in this direction," he stressed.
He also advised media outfits in the country to look at some best practices in international media that have started bringing out a regular column — what was fake last week — on the internet, in the media and 'fact checker reports'.
"These things really highlight as to what we were believing was totally fake. These are the things which will go a long way in warding off the threat from media management side to the elections," he said.
The CEC, during his speech, underlined purification of electoral rolls was a major and important task before the Election Commission and it will go on till the poll body is fully "satisfied" about it.
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