Long before elections went digital, and the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s call for “Chalo Dilli”, urging the masses to march to the national capital on Sunday, November 1, to put pressure on the government and the Election Commission to withdraw every move that has given undue advantage to the BJP, there was rigging.
Does anyone remember Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan, who later became the epitome of electoral management for later generations? Seshan’s claim to fame was that he looked the politicians in the eye and told them that they could not mess around with the polls or ordinary voters. Unlike now, the Election Commission under him always gave an impression of being pro-people. He took great pride in the fact that the ECI – under his charge – got ordinary Dalit voters of Western Uttar Pradesh to exercise their franchise. For many years, they were asked by Jat landlords to disappear into sugarcane fields till the polling was over, as their votes would be cast by others. The most important thing was that he managed to clean up the Augean stables of the ECI without having to change the existing election laws. It was only his resolve and commitment to holding free and fair elections that saw candidates and voters all falling in line to give Seshan a good name.
Seshan adored interacting with a group of journalists to seek their views on elections and politics. He made life miserable for many politicians, including the PM of the day, PV Narasimha Rao. He was quite liberal about sharing little nuggets of information about what was happening in the government. Those were different times when news and its outlets enjoyed precedence over politics and the shenanigans of the corporate world. In other words, the newspapers were respected and listened to.
Very briefly, the conduct of elections was discussed over acts of rigging, but questions about voting and how it could be manipulated continued even in the early 90s. One recalls the elections to the Haryana Assembly at Meham in 1990, from where then CM Om Prakash Chautala was contesting. This writer, who went to Meham to check on the allegations of possible rigging, was physically lifted by the supporters of the CM and dumped on the national highway with a warning: “We can make you six inches shorter if you come back to the booth again.” It does not need more imagination to ascertain what happened in Meham thereafter.
Similar events played out in Amethi, where Rajiv Gandhi contested Lok Sabha elections for the first time. The managers of Gandhi realised to their horror that Rajiv had polled 99 per cent of the votes. In other words, more booths were rigged than desired. Lest the elections get annulled, the managers got promptly into the job and brought the votes to an acceptable level that allowed Rajiv to win – handsomely – thereby lifting the haze of disqualification.
Despite the shift to electronic voting machines (EVMs), voting is a mess, but with a difference. While voting could be rigged by individual candidates in paper voting, with EVMs the chances are far more sinister. It is possible that, through sophisticated devices, EVMs could be manipulated through a Wi-Fi-enabled network. Though nervous candidates have been zealously guarding their votes and EVM machines, there is plenty of evidence that they can do precious little. The complaints of EVM rigging continue to mount, thus failing to provide comfort to those who fight elections and aspire to win.
There have been a number of instances of vote manipulation which have not been adequately challenged. Many years ago, this reporter confronted a famous CEC and asked him why he so aggressively and passionately supported the EVMs. “Are you a technical guy? Do you know how the EVMs are manipulated?” Seeing my aggression, the former CEC was left nonplussed and could not muster a reply. He quietly revealed that the ECI did not have the technical skills to service lakhs of machines. “It is then that the machines are souped up,” I said. The penny dropped for the CEC, and he promptly wrote an article stating that there was a possibility that the machines could be rigged when they were being serviced by freelance technicians. Servicing 20 lakh EVMs is a gargantuan task, and it could take a lot of human effort to make them serviceable. If these service centres have an agenda or a bias, then it can be found in a rigorous check. Being perfunctory does not help. This is precisely what happened when VVPAT, with the mandate to check only 2 per cent of the machines, was attached to the EVMs. Save for generating scepticism, these VVPATs failed to satisfy the misgivings among the detractors of this arrangement. There was also criticism that even the 2 per cent of VVPATs that were matched with EVMs in each constituency were not counted. That was the reason that votes counted on EVMs were contested everywhere.
In Western UP and Uttarakhand, there were a number of instances of EVM rigging, but the courts and the ECI did precious little. And all this happened before the country got to know there was a bureaucrat called Gyanesh Kumar who would turn the electoral process so biased towards the BJP.
After the Congress was ousted in 2014, the BJP ensured that the party that ruled the state came to power – again and again. It happened in phases. Initially, the voters who were hostile to the BJP were blocked from voting. These were mostly from the minority community. This was rampant in Western UP, where the district administration put up barricades in areas where there was a dense population of Muslims. Rampur and Moradabad in UP are cases in point. Now, the issue had evolved beyond rigging to come to power. It was now a matter of removing all those who seemed to be hostile to the BJP or the grander vision of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mothership of Hindutva. The credit for teasing out evidence of “vote theft” or vote chori goes to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. He brought out how the voters had disappeared in Maharashtra and other states. This was not entertained by the EC till the exposé by the Indian Express newspaper, which revealed that the EC’s exercise to weed out voters – dead or otherwise – was flawed.
The anger against SIR, or Special Intensive Revision of voters, came to a head when many voters, including former diplomats and army officials, had their names missing from the electoral rolls in the capital, Delhi. The Supreme Court was sympathetic to those whose names were missing. There is a view that the BJP would have struggled to win against the TMC if the SIR had not removed lakhs of voters, the majority of them tarred as Muslim illegals from Bangladesh. A similar strategy was played out in Assam. A large number of Muslim voters found their votes deleted. The saffron colour spread rapidly in northeastern India, which has a violent legacy of bloodshed at the time of Partition. Disturbingly, the hate and suspicion of neighbours have continued even after the Partition of Bengal and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh. If it is not stopped, the country could see another Partition – a division between the people who can vote and those who cannot. This will be the first phase before the disenfranchised are forced into camps. Will anyone remember Mahatma Gandhi then? The November 1 rally of Rahul Gandhi will decide whether the BJP and Gyanesh Kumar succeed in this enterprise.
Chalo DilliECIElectionGyanesh KumarIndiaNarendra Modirahul gandhi