 "And the winner is... the Election Commission")
In those days, 'rigging elections' was an accepted phenomenon and there were many methods of doing it. Location of polling booths was one way: If the booths were located in areas dominated by the upper castes, the Dalits would simply not go to vote, fearing intimidation and violence. Stuffing pre-stamped ballot papers in ballot boxes and "snatching" ballot papers (getting voters to give their ballot papers to one man and telling them they could go home, someone would cast their vote for them) were also well known. The ballot boxes would then be taken to the counting centres to be counted and voila, you had the result you wanted.
Rivals of the man who won the by-election said they stumbled upon a totally new stratagem - they found trucks loaded with ballot boxes parked on one side of the road some days after the elections. When they investigated, they found that it was not the ballot boxes that had been rigged - several trucks full of ballot boxes had been "replaced" by other trucks. So, whole trucks had been switched. Obviously, a ballyhoo was raised. But, an electoral defeat was an electoral defeat and no one had the stomach for long court cases. The controversy died down. The man who won the seat went on to become a minister. When contacted before his death in 2013, he neither confirmed nor denied the story.
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That was a particularly sophisticated form of managing the election. But, there was no doubt that Indian democracy, so proud of being the largest unguided democracy on earth, was in danger of being ridiculed by the world if creative management of elections continued. It would take a brutal intervention from a deeply unpopular Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) T N Seshan to set things right. But, things have a way of sliding and contestants were constantly thinking of new and ingenious ways to ensure elections went their way.
It was not only bribes given to voters to make them vote in a certain way but also their absence from polling booths that could alter the outcome of the election. If the state was unable to ensure physical safety of citizens to enable them to vote for the candidate they wanted to elect, what was the point of an election?
In many areas, bans on elections by Left extremist groups saw poor polling. In West Bengal's Jangalmahal areas, for instance, dominated by Maoists, almost no one came out to vote in vast swathes of the area in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009. "Booth no. 55 in Kantapahari saw 0.05 per cent turnout. In adjoining booth 56, the turnout was zero," local media reported in 2009 about Lalgarh, the heart of Maoist activity in West Bengal.
In the 2011 Assembly elections, the situation had changed. Seventy-six per cent people came out to vote, only two years later. In the 2016 Assembly election, the turnout in all areas of Lalgarh was an average 80 per cent.
How did this happen?
In 2011, around 600 companies of paramilitary forces were stationed to ensure elections were free. But, this was not only thoughtless deployment of armed might. The seeds of an idea called 'vulnerability mapping' were laid in 2005.
Former chief election commissioner Navin Chawla says: "Our preparation began with a by-election to the Aurai Assembly seat in December 2005. During the campaign period, voters from the weaker sections complained to the election observer that in the past, they had difficulties in accessing the polling stations due to intimidation by local musclemen. The observer brought this to the notice of R Balakrishnan, then deputy election commissioner in charge of Uttar Pradesh. On the forenoon of poll day, the observer noticed that in one particular polling station, voters from the weaker sections had not come to vote. The observer went to the village and saw a few hundred voters being prevented by a handful of armed men from casting their votes. Taking help of the local police, the voters were enabled to proceed to the polling station."
Chawla says the observer's report was telling. The observer wrote: "Towards the end of the polling, I visited a few villages where there had been complaints of stopping of Dalit voters. There appears to be some truth in such allegations. I met several Dalit voters who showed me their identity cards issued by the Election Commission and complained they had been unable to vote because the dominant castes had warned them not to proceed to the polling booths. There was no intimidation in or near the polling booths as such... No immediate remedy in this regard suggests itself, since it is not possible for the electoral officers or police to patrol the villages so intensively as to provide security/escort to every voter from his doorstep to the polling booth. The same situation would be faced even if a re-poll were to be ordered in such areas."
Balakrishnan submitted the details of these incidents to the Election Commission (EC). The EC had mandated that the 100-metre periphery around the polling booth be safeguarded. Obviously this was not enough. An institutional method was needed to identify the areas likely to be affected by such threat; and also keep track of the people who could create such disturbances. "From this was born a new methodology, which we named 'Vulnerability Mapping', borrowing the term from Disaster Management," Chawla said, adding the next step was to identify habitats and segments of voters vulnerable to intimidation in the past. Once this was done, steps could be taken to prevent this from happening again.
"This method brought a new focus to ensure clear accountability, give visibility to institutional intervention and send a no-nonsense message about the seriousness of elections. It proved to be an effective confidence building measure," he said.
Over the years, the EC has refined Vulnerability Mapping. There was a lot of grumbling when the just-concluded West Bengal Assembly election, for instance, was scheduled to be held, spread over six phases. The election process itself went on for more than a month. But, with stunning success. Around 14,000 pockets across the state were identified as vulnerable. Video cameras were installed as additional security measure, along with poll observers of various categories and central armed forces. These then provided live broadcast of the activity there to the district control room. The cameras monitored all those entering the booth and those standing at the gates. The fact that cameras were installed was given wide publicity.
District-level helplines were started from the moment the campaigning started, so that people could call and lodge complaints. Officials in vulnerable districts kept a master list of persons who were contact points to get feedback on electoral conditions.
The EC has developed a system of Vulnerability Ranking. In this ranking, everything figures: Past history of poll violence, high-profile candidates contesting from there, abnormally high or low voting, a particular candidate getting more than 90 per cent of votes, a high number of voter slips without accompanying photographs, etc. In many states, the EC ordered that political parties will not be permitted to distribute election slips.
All this conveyed to people that the EC was serious about its zero-tolerance policy towards disruption of elections. The result was, in Bengal alone, known for endemic election violence, the average turnout hovered at 80 per cent plus. In the April 4 poll for instance, 18 constituencies went for polling out of which 13 constituencies were identified as Left Wing Extremism (LWE). Around 80 per cent voter turnout was recorded in this phase. No election violence was reported. Talking to local media, a resident said: "There were no IED blasts and no one died. The Maoists had called for a boycott and everyone ignored it. People felt safe enough to go and vote."
This is a far cry from the way India has held elections in the past. The 1989 elections saw riots between Hindus and Muslims taking place in Jaipur, Rajasthan, for the first time in history. This happened because voting was done manually (not via electronic voting machines) and ballot papers were brought from the polling booths according to numerical order and counted in that order. So when the counting was over and the results were out, it became clear from the pattern of voting that the Muslim areas had voted against the BJP MP from Jaipur, Girdhari Lal Bhargava. An angry mob set fire to Muslim-dominated areas during a victory rally taken out by Bhargava's supporters. When the riot was analysed by the EC, then CEC T N Seshan ordered that the ballot papers be mixed without fail before they were counted, so that polling agents would not know in which booth who voted how.
Every election is a challenge to the EC. And every election sees a refinement of the way it is held. The question is whether this can be extended to local body elections as well.