It shouldn't be. It should be a total disaster, because in this country we routinely mess up much simpler tasks. If you've ever tried to build a house to a schedule, you know this viscerally, in a way that makes your brain pain. So imagine what it might take to get several hundred million people on the electoral rolls, set up enough polling booths within easy reach of the entire voting population, make sure that the booths have electronic voting machines, and electricity, and privacy, make sure that the person who turns up to vote is the person on the rolls, make sure that person is not intimidated by anyone else in the polling station, and make sure that that, having voted, that person does not waltz out of the polling station and into another one to vote again.
Of course, you're going to point out that we have any number of failures along the way. People are often left out, find themselves deleted from the rolls, are intimidated, or press the wrong button in consternation. The machines don't work. They find that their voter cards are not sufficient to allow them to vote. (Makes you wonder what the card is about.) Addresses shift. In this election in Delhi, no less than 7,000 people in one area found their names struck off the rolls.
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Still, make no mistake: It is nothing short of extraordinary that you can walk into a polling station, check your name off a list, and vote.
I love reading about how the Election Commission treks for six days with a peg leg, one eye gouged out, and one hand tied behind their backs, through wastelands, jungles and malarial swamps, to set up a polling booth for a single voter aged 105 who hasn't come out of his cave for 30 years. I love it that they use helicopters, elephants and Na'vis to transport their paraphernalia to the appropriate locations. I love the way they become, for a time, the national schoolmasters, rapping rowdy political parties on the knuckles and sending them to stand in the corner in a dunce hat for breaking rules, making way for... me. You. Us. Voters. India. This is the day we become VIPs. The attitudinal turn of politicians towards voters on this day and the days running up to it is enough to make you dizzy and have to sit down and ask for water. The hypocrisy of it makes you want to throw up your lunch. But on voting day itself, you can just enjoy the fact that they are sweating, not you.
My polling booth was staffed by a set of extremely querulous electoral officers who were having a disagreement about how many voters each was supposed to process and who had come in early or late and was a lazy, shirking so-and-so. One officer, who had clearly been on the job too long, was squeezed into a schoolroom chair like a bear on a tricycle, snoring gently. A bank of official observers was sitting silently across the room. When one of them tried to contribute to the discussion, the first group of officials turned and yelled at him with one voice. A grinning cop stood by, trying to sort the scrum at the voting slip counter into a discernible line. A lady barged up to the top of the queue saying 'Ladies' line!' and was firmly told there was no such thing. It was all very jolly.
Except for this indelible purple ink thing. There has got to be a better way of marking the voter than making them jump for weeks thinking that there's a bug on their finger. I saw a great hideous smear on the index finger of the voter in front of me, so when my turn came I stopped the official and applied the ink myself. It was small and neat, but it still leaked into the wrinkly bits of my finger.
As I write this it's already clear that change is in the air in Delhi. On Twitter, a top-trending #Vote4Sheila had been replaced by #RIPCongress. By the end of this weekend, we will likely be living under a different regime. I may or may not have chosen it, but I can say that I did my part in the decision-making process.
Now we just have to get to the point where the average citizen is treated like a VIP on all the days between elections too.