Free and fair elections

Lessons from the recently concluded Bihar assembly elections N Gopalaswamy Delhi The recently concluded elections to the Bihar assembly have attracted nation-wide attention and appreciation because of the extraordinarily (by Bihar standards) peaceful poll perceived to be by far the fairest in that part of the country. A keen watcher of the electoral scene in India remarked that this poll has demonstrated that the election commission of India (ECI) has successfully migrated over the years from macro-management at the national level to booth-level management at the field level and this change of focus has led to the success of the campaign of the commission for a free and fair poll. Naturally one would be curious to know what steps went into making this change effective. The commission has always believed that the first prerequisite for a free and fair poll is a clean and up-to-date electoral roll. The commission has strived to achieve this but with varying degrees of success mostly decided by the level of commitment of the staff at the field level. What made the difference this time in Bihar was the availability of the rolls in electronic form and technology-savvy officers. It is a lot easier now to scour the rolls for duplicate names and suspicious entries. An exercise was undertaken to compare the mid-term population figures of citizens 18 years and above in age with the total of electors in the electoral rolls and identify the districts, talukas and villages showing conspicuous deviation and therefore requiring intervention to closely scrutinise the rolls in those identified areas. A software programme generated a list of households showing more than 10-15 voters and these were also verified to eliminate the names of the dead and migrated voters from the rolls. These steps were combined with the use of photo-matching software to elicit possible duplicate entries from the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) records and their subsequent verification led to the deletion of in all 18.31 lakh voters from the rolls in Bihar and with the addition of 4.83 lakh new voters, the net reduction amounted to three per cent of the total electorate of the state. Simultaneously a campaign was mounted to raise the percentage of electors covered by EPIC. The constant review and monitoring of the progress of the work paid rich dividends in raising the overall EPIC coverage from 57 per cent to 84 per cent for the state with some constituencies achieving 90-95 per cent coverage. It became possible then for the ECI to insist on the production of EPIC as proof of identity on the day of poll thus doing away with less reliable and more manipulation-prone documents. It was gratifying to see on poll days, in most visuals in the electronic and print media, electors proudly displaying their EPIC while awaiting their turn to vote. Given the worrying situation on the law and order front, the phasing of the election and the induction of the central paramilitary forces in substantial strength were important in ensuring a peaceful poll. A part of the force was inducted a few weeks in advance in order to sanitise the area by conducting raids to unearth illegal firearms and to nab absconding criminals. A strict monitoring of the progress in the execution of non-bailable warrants issued by the courts helped to keep a check on the criminals. On the poll day it was endeavoured to cover almost all sensitive polling stations with armed police either from the central forces or from the Bihar armed police. The designation of a polling station as sensitive is always a contentious issue between the different political parties who try to influence the local administration and in the past allegations used to be made that the district administration was influenced by the government of the day or by influential politicians.