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The great Indian election

In what is by some distance the world’s biggest and most complex democratic exercise, India with 714 million eligible voters will go to the polls in five phases, between April 16 and May 13, to elect 543 members to the 15th Lok Sabha. Despite an increase of 43 million voters and 141,402 polling stations over 2004 (when 687,402 polling stations were set up), the Election Commission of India wisely decided against stretching the election schedule beyond a month. The trick is to strike a delicate balance between taking care of security and logistics, which dictate a spread-out schedule, and avoiding an unduly long process, which would make electioneering even more punishing than it is during an Indian summer. What will be mind-boggling to outsiders is the army of 4.1 million civil staff members and 2.1 million security personnel who will be deployed for the exercise. The complexity is enhanced by the fact that the phasing and sequencing of the elections must factor in inter-State boundaries to guard against what the ECI describes as “cross-border influences” in the peaceful conduct of the polls. To the Commission’s credit, everything was worked out to the last detail in consultation with Home Ministry officials, and Chief Secretaries, Directors General of Police, and Chief Electoral Officers of all States. As educational institutions would need to double as polling stations, the first phase of the election had necessarily to wait until the second week of April, when public examinations would conclude. The absolute outer limit, of course, was May 28 — when a new Lok Sabha had to be in place under the Constitution.

The 2009 election is the first that will feature the use of photo electoral rolls in the whole country with the exception of Assam, Nagaland, and Jammu and Kashmir. A sort of stimulus package for photography is the reported inclusion of 585 million photographs in the electoral rolls, in an effort to prevent impersonation and bogus voting. As though this were not enough, following a special drive, the coverage of Electors’ Photo Identity Cards (EPIC) is now reported to be 82 per cent. Together with the use of Electronic Voting Machines, these measures have helped bring in greater transparency and fairness in the conduct of elections. However, the Election Commission would do well not to insist that electors provided with EPIC should be identified at the polling station through that card alone. With the photo electoral roll in place, such insistence would not make much sense and could even end up reducing voter participation. As for the so-called ban on publishing the results of exit polls and opinion polls from 48 hours before voting until the end of the election, media organisations as well as the public must act in the knowledge that the Election Commission is utterly without jurisdiction or statutory authority in its efforts to restrain the media and professionals engaged in psephology, the scientific study of voting behaviour, from doing their job. It is well established that predictive polls do not change voting behaviour. Political parties may fear bad news but there is no reason, six decades into the working of the republican Constitution and the maturing of elective democracy, for the Election Commission not to review its dogmatic thinking on the effects of opinion and exit polls. Finally, Rashtrapati Bhavan’s announcement of the presidential appointment of senior Election Commissioner Navin Chawla to succeed N. Gopalaswami as Chief Election Commissioner with effect from April 20 will remove all uncertainty created by political manoeuvring and provide reassurance of institutional continuity.

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