AN UNDOCUMENTED WONDER : The Making of the Great Indian Elections

by S.Y. Quraishi

After having the tea we were asked to pay the bill. Every one of us searched his pockets and found that none of us carried sufficient money. Between us we could collect about two and a half rupees. Nehru had about a rupee and a quarter, Mrs Purnima Banerjee another rupee and I gave the few annas to complete the full amount required. How awkward would it have been if we had failed to make up the amount among ourselves!’ Today no such awkwardness is likely to assail any candidate or campaigner! Money flows into election sites.

‘There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.’

India is the nation where four great religions of the world, namely, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were born. She is also the country with the second largest number of Muslims in the world. A country where Christianity has existed for 2000 years; and also a place ‘where the oldest Jewish synagogues and Jewish communities have been living from the time when Romans burnt their 2nd temple; where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile reside; where the Zoroastrians from Persia have thrived since being thrown out of their ancient homeland; where Armenians and Syrians and many others have come to live…’ Another little known fact in the world outside, and yet very significant, as noticed by Mitchel is that Indian democracy has had three Muslim Presidents,

and a Sikh representing a small minority is Prime Minister, and interestingly, the head of the ruling party a Catholic Italian woman. One of the three Presidents was a rocket scientist and a hero of the nation. It is also a country where ‘a booming economy is lifting 40 million out of poverty each year and is expected to have the majority of its population in the middle class, already equal to the entire US population, by 2025; where its optimism and vibrancy is manifested in its movies, arts, economic growth, and voting, despite all the incredible challenges and hardships; where all the great powers are vying for influence, as it itself finds its place in the world.’

When 119 special trains with 3,060 coaches speedily roll out, transporting millions of paramilitary, police and security forces, and dozens of helicopters join the operation performing hundreds of sorties, and eleven million people criss-cross from border to border, anyone would assume that India is at war. Yes, from the outside it indeed looks like all-out war but the difference is that this war is waged in peace time by the people themselves, not against an enemy but for the preservation of democracy in a country with

1,163 million citizens and 783 million voters above the age of eighteen years. This largest dance of democracy in the world has to be seen to be believed, for the voting public itself is larger than the population of three continents—Europe, South and Central America and Australia—combined.

The villagers even had the right to recall the elected representatives if they failed in their duty!

In his thoughtful analysis in the book Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience,4 Granville Austin identifies two basic elements in the core vision of the Indian Constitution: (i) preserving and defending national unity by establishing strong

national institutions that work to promote the spirit of democracy, and (ii) providing space for a self-correcting social revolution to improve the living conditions of its citizens.

In the first general elections, about 84 per cent were unable to read and write, forcing the Election Commission to print pictorial party symbols on ballot papers to make voting easier for the unlettered mass of voters. By the fifteenth general elections in 2009, the electorate had already crossed 730 million while the literacy level had also crossed the 70 per cent mark.

‘Arab Spring’ has now become an everyday expression.

According to a PRS Legislative Research study, 10 in 2011, the Parliament sat for seventy-three days in three sessions and 258 of the 803 hours earmarked for business were lost. Out of fifty-four bills listed for consideration, only twenty-eight were passed and eighteen of them in less than five minutes. The

The three general elections held in close succession towards the end of the 1990s threw up four major trends: (i) the decline of a dominant pan-national party, (ii) the emergence of regional parties in a national role, (iii) multi-party coalition politics

and (iv) the ethnicization of the political culture, with each party claiming and often surviving on sectarian support.

Voting is a key human behaviour that keeps democracy alive and enriches its quality and credibility.

Plato’s Republic: ‘Mankind will never see an end of trouble until […] lovers of wisdom come to hold political power or the holders of power […] become lovers of wisdom.’14 Counting of heads is definitely important in all electoral democracies but more important than that is what exactly there is in these heads.

Another notable fact was that the Election Commission came to be constituted even before India became a sovereign republic on 26 January 1950. Article 324 of the Constitution was brought into force on 26 November 1949, when the Constitution was formally adopted by the Constituent Assembly. This Article was one of the few articles which the Constituent Assembly in its wisdom thought fit to be brought into force urgently even before the date of commencement of the Constitution. This evidently shows the significance which the Constitution makers attached to conducting elections to Parliament and state legislatures. Pursuant to this constitutional provision, the Election Commission was established on 25 January 1950, that is, a day before the country became a sovereign republic on 26 January 1950.

The Chronicle of an Impossible Election,

Nobody can be above the institution which he is supposed to serve. He is merely the creature of the institution, he can exist only if the institution exists. To project the individual as mightier than the institution would be a grave mistake. Therefore,

Bimal Jalan, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India once remarked that the same bureaucracy which is otherwise much maligned renders perfect elections when it comes under the command of the Election Commission.

At the time of the last general elections in 2009, India had seven recognized national political parties, forty-four recognized state political parties and more than 1,300 registered political parties. ECI used almost 1.4 million electronic voting machines (EVMs) and more than eleven

million polling staff were deployed in and outside 834,944 polling stations, including about 2.5 million security personnel. Over 2,000 observers, all senior officers of the IAS and allied services, were also deputed, as were almost 1,40,000 micro-observers and about 75,000 videographers…and yet the picture is not complete. You have to add deployment of 40,599 digital cameras, 119 special trains comprising 3,060 coaches for transporting central police forces all over the country, 55 helicopters to do more than six hundred sorties and airlift security personnel; and innumerable election material and complement it with countless buses and jeeps, tractors, motorcycles, bullock carts, mules, camels, and elephants for transportation of men and material.