In the wake of the recent assembly elections in five states, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured victories in three states and the Congress in one, a critical examination of the electoral landscape reveals intriguing disparities.
Despite the Congress garnering more votes than the BJP, there are prevailing “discussions [that] seem to be assuming that the BJP has completely destroyed the Congress,” as per noted psephologist Yogendra Yadav.
This scenario has raised questions about aggressive mind management and media manipulation in Indian elections.
This perception, however, is not solely attributed to Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) doubts but also underscores deeper issues within India’s flawed electoral system, particularly the First Past the Post (FPTP) system.
Also read: Does the First-Past-The-Post System Still Make Sense for India?
First Past the Post system
The Congress received 10,55,033 more votes than the BJP.
In these five states, the BJP won 342 seats, and the Congress won only 235, a difference of 107 seats. This means that despite securing over 10.5 lakh more votes than the BJP in these states, the Congress lost in three of them, raising serious concerns about the fairness of the election process.
In Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the Congress lost mainly because of a five-year anti-incumbency factor. In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP won hugely by a margin of 7.6% vote share, despite ruling the state for the last 18 years. This scenario seems bizarre because in the 2018 election, the BJP had lost to Congress by a 4% vote margin due to the anti-incumbency factor. In fact, it had to engineer huge defection to re-capture power.
Does this imply that the MP voters are inherently different from their neighbours, and have generously rewarded the rot of incumbency and crass defections, as well as the trading of MLAs? Such a notion is challenging to accept.
Let’s look at what happened in the 2019 parliament election with a total electorate of 91.05 crore, out of which 67.4% were polled, amounting to 61.36 crore voters.
The ruling BJP secured 37.36% of these polled votes, which amounted to 22.90 crore voters and 303 seats. Had it been a proportional representation system, instead of the archaic and highly flawed first-past-the-post system (or the simple majority system, wherein the candidate with the highest number of votes in a constituency is declared the winner) as it is now, the BJP’s seat share would have been only 201 in a House of 542.
The party’s vote share as percentage of the total electorate was just 25.15%, which meant that the present Union government that is turning the constitution and institutions of democratic governance upside down, represents only one-fourth of India’s electorate. Yet, we call our country a ‘representative democracy’.
After the election, the Association for Democratic Reforms and Common Cause moved the Supreme Court, challenging the validity of the low mandate, alleging that there had been serious discrepancies between the number of voters in different constituencies and the number of votes counted. These discrepancies, totalling 739,104 votes, were in 347 out of 542 constituencies and range from one vote to 101,323 votes, amounting to 10.49% of the total votes. The case has not even been listed so far, and there has been no response from the Election Commission (EC) on the allegation of fraud in India’s electoral system.
The EC’s conduct of the 2019 general election and its fairness was criticised by several experts, including academicians, civil society organisations, political parties, and former bureaucrats.
The EC’s reaction to these significant public concerns exhibited an indifference bordering on hostility.
Also read: Election Commissioners’ Appointment Bill: Farewell to Free and Fair Elections?
In 2021, the Citizens’ Commission on Elections (CCE), headed by a former Supreme Court Judge, released its second report, analysing the critical aspects concerning elections. It was formed to seek expert advice on elections and generate appropriate findings and provide suggestions to ensure the conduct of elections with fairness and integrity.
The EVM issue
During this process, six themes were identified and dealt with in depth. On the EVM (electronic voting machine) issue, the Commission had depositions from the best of national and international experts. These are the main findings:
Integrity and inclusiveness of the electoral rolls
Firstly, significant exclusion/deletions have been noticed of vulnerable, disadvantaged groups and minority communities, such as Muslims and Christians. The electoral rolls registration machinery has been found deficient in carrying out a door-to-door enrolment campaign. Verification of names in the voter’s list has become a difficult task.
Second, the migrant population has a major problem of casting their votes at the polling station.
Third, it is important to ensure that the maintenance of records should enable complete and public verifiability.
The above are necessary conditions for ensuring the integrity of the electoral rolls.
Separately, EC’s action to link voter ID with Aadhaar is a ‘very dangerous proposition’ and could lead to massive data leak, fraud, and theft that can severely endanger India’s democracy.
Electronic voting [EVM/VVPATs] and its compliance with democracy principles
EVM voting does not comply with the essential requirements of ‘democracy principles’, i.e., each voter having the direct knowledge and capacity to verify that their vote is cast as intended, recorded as cast, and counted as recorded.
It also does not provide provable guarantees against hacking, tampering, and spurious vote injections. Thus, elections must be conducted assuming that the EVMs may possibly be tampered with.
Though VVPAT is installed in every EVM, not even one paper slip is counted and matched to verify or audit the votes polled and votes counted before making the results public. This has exposed elections to serious fraud.
The design and implementation of ECI-EVMs, as well as the results of both software and hardware verification, are not made public. They have also not been opened to full independent review. The VVPAT system does not allow the voter to verify the slip before the vote is cast.
Due to absence of end-to-end (E2E) verifiability, the present EVM system is not verifiable, and therefore is unfit for democratic elections.
So, a stringent pre-audit of the electronic vote count must be conducted before the results are declared. This may require a full manual counting of the VVPAT slips.
The electronic voting system should be redesigned to be software and hardware independent, in order to be verifiable or auditable.
Criminalisation, money power, and electoral bonds
These are enormous problems. The proportion of winning candidates with a criminal background paints a very grim picture. MPs with serious criminal cases against them constituted 14% in 2009, 21% in 2014, and 29% in 2019.
At least 162 MPs declared criminal cases against them in 2009, which increased to 185 in 2014, and 233 in 2019. Those with serious declared criminal offenses increased from 76 in 2009 to 112 in 2014, and to 159 in 2019. The trend is evidently on the rise.
Money and power in elections serve as the fountainhead of corruption in the country. It compromises the integrity of democracy in multiple ways, such as by raising entry barriers to politics, excluding honest candidates and parties, allowing big money to control the state, and leading to distortions in policymaking.
Electoral bonds have increased opaqueness and consolidated the role of big money in electoral politics, giving huge advantage to the ruling party and destroying a level-playing field.
According to the Centre for Media Studies, the total expenditure on the 2019 parliament election was estimated at a staggering Rs 60,000 crore. The ruling BJP reportedly spent close to Rs 27,000 crore, i.e. Rs 89 crore per seat. It won 303 seats.
The fast-rising economic oligarchy in the country, threatening India as a welfare state, is the direct fallout of this extreme criminal and money power in elections.
Scheduling and processes of elections and compliance of Model Code of Conduct
For the 2019 parliament election, the EC, per civil servants and military veterans, deliberately delayed the announcement to enable the prime minister to complete the inauguration blitz of a slew of projects (157 of them) that he had scheduled between February 8 and March 9.
It was the longest election in the country’s history, and its scheduling gave room for suspicion that it had openly and unabashedly favoured the ruling party, they said.
Some major controversies surrounding the Model Code of Conduct include a lack of consistency by the EC in enforcing it, treating the ruling party with kid gloves, and not utilising its powers under Article 324 of the Constitution.
The Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, who was known for dissent in EC, was unceremoniously removed and was denied the opportunity to become Chief Election Commissioner.
The Model Code of Conduct’s raison d’etre was to provide a level-playing field to all contesting political parties. Dealing with the ruling party with kid gloves negates the very reason for its existence.
Additionally, the use (misuse/abuse) of armed forces for election purposes by the party in power was severely criticised by retired soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Calling the Indian Army ‘Modiji ki Sena’ resulted in strong protests from veterans and opposition parties.
Also read: ‘Modi Magic’ Is Nothing but BJP PR Amplified by Media
The role of media
A very substantial section of the mainstream and mass media in the country has become excessively supportive of the ruling BJP.
Despite guidelines and codes, the EC did not take note of the many media violations, particularly by the ruling party.
A new channel called ‘Namo TV’ cropped up in March 2019 without any licence or permission. It went on air and did full-time propaganda for the ruling party.
The EC failed to curb fake news online before and during the 2019 elections.
EC’s autonomy and its functioning before, during, and after elections
The EC has plenipotentiary powers drawn from Article 324 of the Constitution of India to conduct free and fair elections.
In addition, the Supreme Court has ruled: “When Parliament or any State Legislature made valid law relating to, or in connection with elections, the Commission, shall act in conformity with, not in violation of, such provisions, but where such law is silent, Article 324 is a reservoir of power to act for the avowed purpose of pushing forward a free and fair election with expedition…”
But the EC is just not using these powers, because Commissioners are the appointees of the Government of the day and not through an independent process of collegium. This compromises the autonomy of the EC and creates doubts about the neutrality of the Chief Election Commissioner and the Election Commissioners, and consequently, the neutrality of the Commission itself. This poses serious danger to the fairness and integrity of not only the elections, but democracy itself.
The EC has been blind, deaf, and dumb on this objective analysis and report, as well as subsequent pleadings. In the event, things have been going from bad to worse and there are serious doubts as to whether India’s elections are free and fair.
It is in this context Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s exultant prediction of a ‘hat-trick in 2024’ is to be viewed. Is it going to be requiem for India’s electoral democracy?
M.G. Devasahayam is a former Army and IAS officer.
