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14
May 2004
INDIA:
The Largest Democratic Election in Human History
By Vivek Ramkumar
The
largest democratic election in human history ended yesterday
in India. Most of the headlines today focused on the horse
race, that is, the surprising defeat of the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party and the return to power of the Congress Party.
But the election process itself deserves attention, both
for its extraordinary scale, and for the remarkable cleanup
work undertaken by civil society.
Just as a matter of scale, the Indian election ranks as
a miracle. The country includes some 670 million registered
voters - almost more than the combined voter strength of
all the countries of the developed world, including the
United States, the countries of Western Europe, Australia,
Canada, and Japan. These numbers make impossible a single-day
ballot: Voting started on April 20 and continued in five
phases, in some 800,000 polling stations around the country,
under the supervision of nearly five million bureaucrats.
From an estimated 4,000 candidates, Indian voters selected
543 people for the National Assembly (Lok Sabha).
Such
a massive voting process also leaves lots of room for corruption
and fraud. Politicians use money (to bribe voters) and muscle
(to intimidate voters) in their quest for power. In the
northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, criminal
gangs have long been employed by political parties to take
control of polling stations and cast all votes at the stations
in favor of one political candidate. The introduction of
Electronic Voting Machines during the current elections
did not deter such activity: Gun-toting 'private contractors'
now boast of employing science and engineering graduates
to rig the machines in 'captured' polling stations.
The scope for blatant electoral abuse in India also encourages
corrupt individuals to seek political office. Some seek
parliamentary immunity; others want to turn the levers of
government power against the government's own law enforcers.
In the Gonda constituency in Uttar Pradesh, for example,
voters had their choice among a host of criminals, including
Brij Bhushan Saran Singh (16 pending criminal cases), Rizwan
Zaheer (23 pending criminal cases), and Dr Mohammad Umar
(only one pending criminal case).
Recognizing
the increasing corruption in politics, civil society groups
throughout India decided to fight back. A group of concerned
citizens persuaded the Indian Supreme Court in 1999 to order
candidates for public office to file disclosure affidavits
with the Election Commission (EC), and the EC in turn made
these documents available to the public. For the first time,
India's voters now have access to information about a candidate's
criminal record, educational qualifications, and personal
wealth. In several cases, the exposure of criminal backgrounds
in media reporting actually pressured parties against including
such candidates on their lists.
Many Indians are illiterate, and most do not have time to
read through the disclosure affidavits, so civil society
groups and their supporters in 12 states of India organized
themselves into Election Watch teams. These teams prepared
and circulated user-friendly profiles of candidates in each
constituency, organized 'meet the candidate' sessions and
extensive press briefings to publicize information from
candidate disclosure forms. Despite widespread media coverage,
disclosure alone has not created a level playing field,
because traditional factors like caste, religion and local
issues continue to drive voter choices.
More striking results came from Election Watch efforts to
check the voter rolls. Surveys by one group in Andhra Pradesh
of around 40,000 voters found that as many as 20-to-30%
of the names contained in the state's voter registration
rolls contained errors. Election Watch groups then pressed
the Election Commission to modify its method for revising
registration rolls, moving the process to the village level
rather than at less accessible central government offices.
A series of village community meetings in the state of Rajasthan
brought about 700,000 corrections (additions and deletions)
in a voter list containing nearly 34 million names.
Election
Watch teams also monitored the election process closely
to enforce the Election Commission's code of conduct, which
establishes limits on election-related expenditures and
disallows specific activities during the election campaign
cycle. Typical violations include bribing voters with offerings
of alcohol, clothes, and food items; misuse of government
machinery by incumbent candidates to support their re-election
bids; and use of hate speeches and other divisive media
by candidates to vitiate the communal environment. However,
the challenge of identifying and isolating violations by
specific candidates in an environment in which many candidates
are guilty of violations has meant that not a single candidate
has yet been disqualified.
Faced
with such mixed results, electoral reform activists in India
are rethinking their strategies to stem corruption. Disclosures
by candidates, cleaning up the voter rolls, and the close
monitoring of elections are certainly important components
of the electoral reform process. But it may be that a comprehensive
solution to the problem of political corruption must be
itself political in nature. By the time of the next national
election, civil society groups themselves may provide viable
political alternatives-by establishing electoral parties
that emphasize ethics and principles in public life.
Vivek
Ramkumar is a member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan
peoples' movement in India, and of the freedominfo.org network
of openness advocates.
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