T. N. Seshan: the IAS officer who made India's elections fair

From Thirunellai to the IAS

Tirunellai Narayana Iyer Seshan was born in Thirunellai village near Palakkad in Kerala, the youngest of six children. Sources differ on the year, giving 1932 or 1933. He studied at Government Victoria College in Palakkad and then took an honours degree in physics at Madras Christian College, where he taught briefly after graduating.

He topped the civil services examination and joined the 1955 batch of the Indian Administrative Service, allotted to the Tamil Nadu cadre. Later he studied at Harvard University on a fellowship.

Stories from his early postings show the kind of officer he was. As transport commissioner in Madras, he learned to drive a bus so that he would understand the problems drivers faced, and once drove a bus full of passengers for eighty kilometres.

“I eat politicians for breakfast.”

— T. N. Seshan, via Newslaundry

Rising to Cabinet Secretary

His central postings included the Department of Space, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, where he served as secretary, and internal security, where he worked closely with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He spent time in the Planning Commission and briefly as Defence Secretary.

In 1989 he became Cabinet Secretary, the highest post a career civil servant can hold in India, during the last months of Rajiv Gandhi's government. By then he had served in the IAS for more than three decades.

Six years that changed Indian elections

On 12 December 1990 Seshan took office as the tenth Chief Election Commissioner of India. The Election Commission was then a low-profile body. According to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, his first study of the system listed a hundred and fifty specific abuses, and when politicians were slow to legislate reforms he set about enforcing the law himself.

He read Article 324 of the Constitution, which gives the Commission the superintendence, direction and control of elections, as broadly as it could be read. He enforced the Model Code of Conduct, acted against the distribution of liquor and the bribing of voters, stopped the misuse of government machinery and religious appeals in campaigns, and made candidates account for their spending. He pushed hard for photo identity cards for every voter. In Bihar in 1995 he held the state election in four phases, a novelty at the time.

The confrontations were fierce. In 1993 the central government made the Commission a three-member body, and Seshan took the matter to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him in 1995. He stayed until his term ended on 11 December 1996. That year he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service.

Later years

After leaving the Commission he contested the 1997 presidential election and lost, and in 1999 he lost a Lok Sabha election from Gandhinagar. His biography, Seshan: An Intimate Story by K. Govindan Kutty, records the many episodes of his career.

He died at his home in Chennai on 10 November 2019, aged 86, after a cardiac arrest. Former Chief Election Commissioners described him as a guiding force for everyone who came after him. Business Today notes that the modern Election Commission, with its observers and expenditure scrutiny, is in large part his legacy.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was knowing the text. Seshan did not invent new powers; he read Article 324 closely and used what was already there. That is the habit the UPSC syllabus on polity is meant to build.

The second was method. The Magsaysay citation records that he began by listing the abuses, one by one, before he acted. A systematic study of the problem came before the famous confrontations.

The third was doing the job in person, whether that meant driving a bus as transport commissioner or scheduling a state election in phases himself. He understood the ground before he gave orders about it.