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SHRI P.H. PANDIAN (TIRUNELVELI): Sir, I rise to support this Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 1999 on the following grounds. It was earlier piloted by a very senior advocate and former Law Minister, Shri Ram Jethmalani, and now again it is being piloted by the present Law Minister who happens to be a senior counsel. The proxy voting is not unknown to the world. It is known to the entire civilised world. In the United States, there is proxy voting. The handicapped and other people, who have deformities, can be represented by proxy at the booth. So also, proxy voting is in vogue in Japan-- the most industrialised country--Belgium and in some other countries of the world. So, the right to vote is a Constitutional right. Right to stand for election is a statutory right. Shri Varkala Radhakrishnan had said that the right to get elected is a fundamental right. Nobody has got the right to get elected. The people have to decide that. But you have got the right to stand for election.

Sir, this is not the only case. I referred in the case of corruption the Supreme Court’s observations which almost said that secrecy is not so vital. If secrecy, at times, leads to corruption and corrupt practice in an election, then the Supreme Court also said let transparency come in.

Here, the principle of secrecy, which we are following by a postal ballot, is leading to deprivation of the right to vote. It is leading to 90 per cent of our Armed Forces virtually being de-franchised. Do we then not have a little more dynamic thinking and look how people elsewhere in the world have thought of it? Now, I have cases. I have tried to study as to what they do in the other countries. It is not that we are experimenting it here for the first time. Liberal democracies in the world have experimented it. The United States of America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Japan, Ivory Coast, France, Canada and Belgium are all countries which have now in a general election experimented the principle of proxy voting. They used the word `proxy’. We are confining it to only Armed Forces, but they have, in some cases, gone a step ahead of us. There are some countries where visually challenged people, physically challenged people can appoint a proxy holder to vote for them.

We are not making such an exception today. There was a question yesterday which an hon. Member had raised, but we first have to see how our experiment succeeds because in the case of diplomatic staff in our country, we do not have to go via the Army Headquarters and the regional headquarters and then to the frontiers. We have a two-day service where you can send the vote through the diplomatic bag and in another two days it can come back through the diplomatic bag. We do not have a problem of this kind. In the case of diplomats, most diplomats have their immediate families residing with them in whichever sector of posting they are there. So, this problem which is peculiar to the Armed Forces in the non-family stations does not apply to diplomats. There may be some who have the same constraints, but there are countries which I have named, where diplomatic staff and those working in Missions abroad, have been allowed proxy voting.

United Kingdom has gone to the extent that if somebody on the date of elections is travelling outside the country, he can go to the returning officer before his travel, take a proxy form and authorise somebody else. It is because it is not something which you are compulsorily imposing upon another person, it is a voluntary exercise of that proxy. So, if the person who has a right to cast his vote voluntarily decides that I do not want the postal ballot, I do not want to go myself, I am 2,000 kilometres away, I am authorising my father or my son or my daughter or my wife and I trust them that they would cast their vote according to the principle, this is the principle on which the proxy voting has been given.