In the raucous debate around ‘One Nation, One Poll’ and other electoral amendments and reforms, a significant electoral transgression that is studiously ignored and always put aside is the unsettled issue of declaring booth-wise results by the Election Commission of India (EC).
The consequences of knowing how a booth, which represents a clutch of streets, has voted not only goes against the principle of secret ballot but is lethal and destructive when threats, harassment and intimidation are used by political parties to force a voter to go their way. The only safeguard is to get a totaliser, which has been developed by the EC to be attached to the EVM. Eminent lawyer and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal, first with the Congress and now with ally Samajwadi Party, outlines the road ahead.
Excerpts from the interview below.
Do you agree with the Election Commission’s recommendation from 2008, to get totalisers?
Well, the nature of the Election Commission has changed today, and unfortunately that recommendation which was extremely significant for the Election Commission to ensure free and fair elections, the EC today is in complete alignment with the present government. So, you can’t expect anything from the EC anymore.
Totalisers are crucial as they prevent political parties from getting booth-wise results, which goes against the principle of secret ballot…
Yes, for electoral fairness, it is crucial political parties are not allowed to manipulate results, and a totaliser would have ensured that political parties have no access to find out how citizens have voted and for which party in any particular booth.
A totaliser in an EVM mixes up votes, like in the pre-EVM age of paper ballots, thus making it impossible to find out how a booth voted?
Prior to the introduction of EVMs, ballot papers could be mixed if there was any apprehension of intimidation of voters. Therefore, if political parties don’t have access to booth-wise results, they cannot pressurise or threaten those particular voters of the locality who didn’t vote for them.
The EC recommendation came when your government UPA II was in power, but nothing happened despite the setting up of a parliamentary committee to look into it.
The parliamentary committee was set up in 2009, but it reached nowhere… however, I don’t think the Congress party would have opposed the idea, most political parties and allies were in alignment with this recommendation.
I think we really didn’t realise the significance or the importance of this necessity then, the enormity of the situation came to us later, in 2014 after the new government came to power. It has been stonewalling the recommendation of totalisers and has not come forward to support it.
In August 2014, after the Modi government came to power, the EC moved the law ministry yet again, but it was only after the Supreme Court took note on the basis of a PIL in September the same year, that the issue was in the spotlight again.
That’s correct, the PIL has been asking the government what it intends to do; after all, the EC can’t formally say it doesn’t agree with its own recommendations. The EC today is obviously not pushing for it, nor is the government very keen on it and the issue is lying in limbo.
In January 2017, a group of ministers headed by Rajnath Singh, that included Arun Jaitley, Manohar Parrikar and others, rejected the introduction of totalisers saying booth management helps parties to be responsive to people’s needs.
The GoP rejected totalisers saying machines are involved and so they can’t interfere, and other reasons mentioned above, but there’s no mention (of the danger) of knowing voter results. As I said, this government is not at all keen on totalisers because it wants to collect booth data for the purposes of pressurising the voters.
There’s the well-known case where BJP MP Maneka Gandhi publicly said at election rallies that development will be cut off going by booth results. So did Tejasvi Surya, who showed how Hindus and Muslims vote, from booth results.
These are the tactics they use to manipulate the results, and pollute the election process. The BJP or any political party knows from booth-wise results that in this particular area, the voters are with us or against us. Post-election too, it’s easy to find out voting trends from booth results, politicians can intimidate and threaten as Maneka warned voters during her campaign.
There are other ways to cut out your anti-vote by looking at past voting trends from booths – eliminate or delete names from electoral rolls; only one Aadhaar card is reflected and not of the others in a family; then they find homes that have been vacated but members are still on the voter rolls and votes are cast in their names after 5 pm in collaboration with the person in charge of the polling booths.
Manipulation of EVMs is a very unpopular allegation because nobody can actually prove it, but either way, the presumption is that any machine can be manipulated.
You also have a prime minister today who blows up hundreds of crores of taxpayers’ money on his election campaigns. Does that give him an unfair advantage?
Isn’t it up to the EC to take note of what’s going on? If institutional processes don’t work, then the Prime Minister will do what he wants to do, unhindered. The institutional processes in this country have been dismantled, so obviously there is no institutional check on activities. Every institutional structure has been systematically dismantled, including of course, the EC, which is a collaborator in this enterprise today. We’ve seen the EC watching with complete disregard when in one constituency the voting is going on and next door, in another state where the election is going on, the Prime Minister is making an election appeal which is being televised. The EC is quiet and doesn’t send notices when ministers and political leaders make disparaging remarks and threaten communities.
The mainstream media too is a very active collaborator with the BJP, these are institutional structures that have been dismantled for reasons of greed – for high TRPs, and where industrial houses which own the media seek favours from the government on a daily basis.
I don’t have too much hope in the institutions waking up to their responsibilities. and I sincerely hope the court intervenes and takes action.
But journalists, human rights activists, academics, students have also been picked up and thrown into prison. And hate speakers are simply let off the hook?
We look at the hate economy all the time. We are filing petition after petition in the Supreme Court almost on a daily basis, like on the dharam sansad etc, but very little has come out of it. Why should hate speeches have to go to court? The process is simple – wherever a hate speech is made, the local administration should move in, file an FIR, investigate the case, and people punished. All these hate speeches are made mostly in areas where the BJP is in power.
We just got a couple of orders from Justice KM Joseph, he’s retired now. Justice Sanjiv Khanna is looking at matters today, he has taken some effective steps, hope it works out. Justice Khanna is also in line to be the next chief justice of India.
They pick up journalists, activists, academics, students, and members of the minority communities, those who speak against the government and voice dissent. Most of them are of course without any basis, but they foist cases on them, from sedition to causing enmity etc under sections 153 A, 298 A of the IPC. Cases are lodged against people based on all kinds of conspiracy theories which have no basis at all, but court procedures take a lot of time.
What are the safeguards then, to ensure a free and fair poll before 2024?
The only hope is the court. We should go back to the Supreme Court, we will file a comprehensive petition for electoral reform to make the process of election fair, which will of course, include the insistence on a totaliser. I think the court and political parties must rule in favour of totalisers.
We have to also see how they manipulate the election results, the deletion of people on the electoral roll, deletion of families or particular communities. Or, how the administration and the police forces disallow people to go out and vote, the EVMs, the paper trail, etc. It’s time to wake up the nation on all these issues.
