The Election Commission’s decision directing the Centre to defer the notification of a revised price for domestically produced gas from April 1 is questionable on many counts. Fixing the new price was not, by any means, a new policy decision taken by the Centre. It is, therefore, difficult to see how it attracts the Model Code of Conduct, which prohibits new initiatives that could skew the result in favour of the party in power, after elections are announced. The notification of the revised price was a mere formality, given that the basis for it flowed from the domestic natural gas pricing guidelines issued on January 10. These spelt out a formula for determining domestic gas prices that are to be notified every quarter, starting from April 1. Since the guidelines per se were approved by the Union Cabinet on June 27 and formally notified on January 10 — well before elections were declared on March 5 — price fixation would only have given effect to an old policy decision.

By asking the Centre to defer the notification, the EC may have made the playing field uneven rather than it level it. Far from denying the party in power an unfair advantage, the EC, by preventing the gas prices to be doubled, has robbed the Aam Aadmi Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party of a possible campaign issue. It is the AAP, of course, which may have influenced the EC’s decision. But it hardly speaks well of an environment when a petition to put the gas price on hold is taken so seriously and a climate exists when the Centre believes it should seek the EC’s nod in this regard.

The explanation given by the EC for its decision to defer the price notification — the matter being ‘sub judice’ because of a petition in the Supreme Court — is specious. What force can this argument have when the Court itself has not barred the Centre from revising gas prices? There are, after all, many policy decisions on which PILs have been filed and heard: for instance, the one on permission for field trials of genetically modified crops. Such decisions, by the executive of an elected and legally constituted government, have validity unless struck down by the courts. The implementation of domestic gas pricing guidelines from April 1 has neither been stayed by the apex court nor does it come in the way of the free and fair conduct of polls. The EC has, in this instance, clearly exceeded its brief.

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