Currying Favour among the Masses - Election Indian-Style

Yesterday, as British Columbians went to the polls to elect a new government and decide on a new system of voting, I found myself trapped in the Indian Himalaya city of Nainital. By trapped, I mean stuck inside this hill station town surrounded by army roadblocks unable to leave for our next destination some 250 km away. Inside the city, armed police guards were staked out at strategic points and road junctions carefully observing milling crowds to ensure no disruption of order. The reason for this display of force - Civil insurrection? A terrorist threat? None of the above, I was assured as I was welcomed to Election Day in India.

Over the past several weeks traveling throughout India, I have been fascinated by watching the world’s largest democracy cranking up its creaky electoral machine into action. With over 700 million eligible voters, India’s national election takes three weeks and five phases to complete as each of India’s 29 states goes to the polls in a staged approach. Yesterday was Nainital’s state of Uttarakhand’s turn in the last day of national voting. The Indian media has, of course, been thick with election news mostly focused on possible alliances to form the next coalition government rather than the campaign promises of dozens of federal parties. As Canadians grow perhaps warily accustomed to a minority government at the federal level, this result is not even in question in India. That there will be a coalition government is a certainly. All that remains to be known is how it will be constituted and who will lead it. Previous Indian governments have featured coalitions involving over 20 parties from right to left – including a few species of Marxist-Leninists who remain alive and well on the Indian political landscape.

There have been campaign promises, no doubt. One popular campaign battle has been waged between India’s two major parties – Congress and the BJP – over the price of a kilogram of rice to be accorded to each individual by quota. Congress was first out of the gate with 3 rupees ($0.07) per kg. for 25 kg of rice per person only to be trumped a week later by BJP’s promises of personal quota of 35 kg of rice for 2 rupees per kg. Both parties have evidently concluding that the quickest way to an “X” on the ballot is through the Indian stomach.

The high security around Election Day has been aimed at preventing what the colourful Indian English media calls “miscreants and agitators” from violently disrupting elections as has been witnessed in the past. Security concerns are a primary motivation behind the rotation of the election throughout the country so the army can be deployed from state to state. Our hotel had the good fortune – or misfortune – to be located across the street from one of Nainital’s two polling stations. The already impossibly narrow road was choked with tables of party workers clustered under the colourful pennants of their parties surveying voters’ lists in their respective efforts to “get the vote out”. Indian voters lists appear to contain a lot of personal information including voter photos taken from Indian National ID cards, making potential supporters easier to target as they stream out of the hills to the polling stations. The polling station itself was protected by several armed officers and, without a national ID card, I was not allowed to get anywhere near the action.

The results of the election will not be known until mid-June. Accordingly, the media has focused on voter turnout, electoral drams in individual ridings and, prominently, the presence of Bollywood stars at polling stations. Mumbai, India’s financial and media centre, voted in the first phase. The day following the poll, the media lamented that for a city that within the past six months had experienced both a devastating terrorist attack and the heavy impact of the global economic meltdown, the pathetic voter turnout in the mid-50% range spoke to an inexplicable apathy to the democratic cause. I noted that voter turnout in this range would cause no small amount of envy among Canadian democracy advocates. Some states registered over 70% voter turnout in their polls.

The election has caused me to reflect, once again, on what we Canadians take for granted in our democratic processes. When was the last time we had to worry about armed forces providing security to protect right to vote and our individual journeys to the polling station? How comfortable would we feel voting in the shadow of armed police guards? “Never” and “not at all” are the answers. Yet despite the police-state feel of the process and the disruption caused to my personal travel plans, the Indian election is surely a thing of beauty when one considers the scope and size of the effort needed to allow Indians to cast their votes and their energetic response in a mammoth expression of democracy.