Illogic of EC logistics

The rest of WB elections should have been clubbed

The Election Commission’s (EC’s) decision to hold an eight-phase election for the 294 seats in West Bengal had raised many questions when it was announced. Now, with Covid-19 raging in the state, thanks to packed, unmasked rallies organised by the major contestants — the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — the EC should have acceded to demands from political parties to club the remaining three phases of the election on April 22, 26, and 29 for 114 seats. The EC has so far turned down this request without explanation. But logic defies this cussedness. Between April 6 and 19, when three phases of the election had been held, West Bengal added over 72,000 Covid-19 cases and, like elsewhere in India, the state’s medical infrastructure is stretched to cope with it. If concern for Covid-19 encouraged the EC to curb campaigns, it is unclear why the same cause could not galvanise its formidable machinery to club the remaining phases.

 
The poll regulator’s original explanation for the eight-phase polls had been that festivals, an increased number of polling booths owing to Covid-19, and the need to keep a buffer for the movement of election officials demanded a lengthier schedule. There was some validity to this reasoning, since there has been a 30 per cent increase in the number of polling booths owing to a restriction in the number of voters per booth. But the veracity of the EC’s argument weakens when the schedules are examined more closely. If, for instance, this extensive phasing was designed to facilitate the movement of election officials, it is unclear why polling in one district — South 24 Parganas — should be held in three phases. Why not have the district, which has 31 Assembly constituencies, vote together on one day? Or why Kolkata should also see three different phases of polling. The scattered geography of the polling schedule is also puzzling.

 
The sixth phase of polling on April 22, for example, will see voters lining up in North Dinajpur near the Nepal border — even as nearby Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri went to vote on April 17 — as well as North 24 Parganas in the Hooghly delta. This is, surely, logistics planning at its most inefficient, quite apart from the sheer waste of taxpayer money. It is unclear what exactly the EC achieves from this prolonged exercise, especially since it required seven phases to conduct the UP Assembly elections in 2017 for 403 seats, covering an area almost three times the size of West Bengal and with almost twice the number of voters. Tamil Nadu, with 243 Assembly seats, completed its election in one phase.

 

More to the point, this stretched scheduling does not uphold the principle of neutrality since it can benefit well-funded parties such as the BJP over those with more limited budgets and fewer campaigners, an issue that opposition parties have pointedly raised several times. As it is, with the EC persisting with its chosen path, neither the BJP nor the Trinamool Congress has backed down on the intensity of their campaigning schedules in these areas with the attendant super-spreader crowds. This defeats the very purpose of Covid-19-appropriate protocols that the EC had cited as the reason for an eight-phase poll in the first place. The EC has been illogical in many of its decisions such as barring the Kerala government from continuing to distribute food kits to areas bearing the brunt of the pandemic. The decision on West Bengal is yet another example of the strange decision-making process of the election body.