By Santwana Bhattacharya
Complaints about the rigging of elections are nothing new in India. The phenomenon has a checkered life of its own. For instance, it is said that the Indian side of Kashmir would have had a different history had Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference not rigged the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir assembly polls.
Had the so-called pro-Pakistan political formation, the Muslim United Front, been allowed to win whatever seats it could, it may have been at some cost to the nationalist party, but hundreds of disenchanted Kashmiri youth would not have been impelled to seek redress through arms training across the border. The Kashmir problem might not have had to go through the phase of militancy that began in 1989 and continues until now at huge human cost on all sides. And the most hawkish of the separatist leaders, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, would still be contesting elections instead of boycotting what he calls "India-sponsored polls".
The second-highest profile allegation came from former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Upset when he failed to defeat the left front in the eastern state of West Bengal, he coined a rather colorful term, "scientific rigging", to describe what he felt was the left's methodical approach to ensure electoral victories for itself - indeed, it has been in power in the state since 1978 and it is a common insinuation that political popularity alone could not have guaranteed such blanket success.
This prompted the Election Commission (EC) to order an inquiry of sorts. As an election observer, civil servant Afzal Amanullah (now principal secretary, Home, in the state of Bihar and currently in the running for the vice-chancellor's position at a prominent Indian university) gave a report detailing what he felt were innovative ways of rigging followed by the left.
For reasons best known to the EC, the Afzal Amanullah report was kept under wraps for many years. This correspondent brought the findings out in the open through an exclusive news report published in The Indian Express daily.
But, rigging's been a story mostly of the paper ballot days. There is no dearth of anecdotes: one has heard of ballot boxes disappearing and then reappearing with a completely new set of ballot papers; voters turning up at polling booths only to find that their votes have already been cast; trucks carrying sealed ballot boxes being hijacked on highways and supplied with a fresh mandate.
All this was routine until the early 1990s, when electoral reforms were initiated. For this much-needed clean-up, then chief election commissioner, T N Seshan, overhauled the functioning of the EC by taking out the dusty rule book from a forgotten shelf.
Ever since the EC started implementing the rules that always existed on paper, it started winning kudos internationally. Its top officials have been appointed special observers by the United Nations in tricky elections around the world. Its technological prowess, the quality of its indelible ink, its skilled manpower - all this received due appreciation.
The centerpiece of this revolution was the electronic voting machine (EVM) - it holds a special place in the technology-savvy EC's inventory. As its application spread progressively across India's political map in a heuristic experiment that went remarkably well, the country registered a concomitant qualitative change in the conduct of its elections.
The 2009 parliamentary election was the first one where millions of voters across the length and breadth of the country cast their votes by pressing buttons on the EVM. No one doubted the efficacy of the instrument - its arrival was taken to herald an efficient and error-proof future.
Among the comic moments of the past few election campaigns was when Laloo Prasad Yadav - a former Railway minister and chief of a regional party in north India who cultivates a deliberately rustic image - initiated not-so-literate rural voters into the technique of voting on the EVMs with an exaggerated "pinggg" sound.
But the EVM's dream run and the EC's perceived infallibility on this front have been challenged in the recent past. Most recently, by the prima donna of Tamil politics, J Jayalalitha of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, who decided to boycott assembly by-elections to five constituencies on the ground that the EVM - the technological foundation on which rests the claim of fair elections - is not tamper-proof.
It is often said that the first sign that a political combination or party is not doing well in an election comes when they leave the campaign trail and take a delegation to the Election Commission's headquarters in New Delhi - invariably to complain about the malpractices of the ruling side. But, on a serious note, the EC does admit that a strong opposition is important for even the conduct of free and fair elections.
Half the time the EC comes to know about the wrongdoings of a candidate by the opposing political camp and not from voters or even poll personnel. But this time, the complaint was not about a candidate or a political party, but the Election Commission itself. Jayalalitha has alleged that the EC has neither been able to provide tamper-proof EVMs, nor has it been able to rein in the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party (DMK) from indulging in electoral malpractices.
Citing a live demonstration given by a software engineer named Hari Prasad in Hyderabad, capital of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, she has decided to not put up candidates in five assembly segments - Cumbum in Theni district, Ilayankudi in Sivaganga, Bargur in Krishnagiri, Srivaikuntam in Tuticorin and Thondamuthur in Coimbatore - where by-elections are scheduled for August 18.
It is the common understanding that she is whipping up a controversy over the EVM only to cover up a political decision. She has been on a losing streak for a few years now. Having been decisively whipped in the recent parliamentary elections by the DMK, it would be suicidal for her to lose any more ground to her bete noire M Karunanidhi.
But the grumblings about the EVMs do not stop here. A parallel plot started with a few people wondering how the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Y S R Reddy, could predict the exact number of votes his party, the Congress, would win in an election that everybody else was sure it was losing. This is snowballing into a crisis of credibility for the Election Commission.
Now, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani, has joined hands with Jayalalitha to express doubts about the EVM. He has said the EC should consider reverting to ballot papers in the elections in Maharashtra, Bihar and other states. The left parties, too, sang in the chorus - let the EVM be re-evaluated.
It is no coincidence that all of them are parties which have tasted defeat in the recent past. To give the issue some veneer of authenticity in the public eye, it needed someone who had no evident vested interest in the process. This was duly provided by a retired civil servant, former Delhi chief secretary Omesh Saigal, who stunned the incumbent chief election commissioner Navin Chawla by demanding an inquiry into the possibility of the rigging of an EVM through pre-programming.
Saigal and Chawla are from the same cadre of bureaucrats; the former is senior to him. Chawla naturally could not wriggle out of the situation without taking some action.
Saigal has claimed that EVMs can be pre-programmed in a manner that every fifth vote cast in a particular polling booth goes in favor of a certain candidate by just keying in a code number. In a letter written to the EC, he alleges that it has never checked the software run on the EVMs. Two public-sector units - Bharat Electronics Ltd and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd - manufacture the EVMs.
To strengthen his case, he looked at some international developments: the Supreme Court of Germany, after a two-year trial, declared e-voting unconstitutional since the average citizen was found to be ignorant of the steps involved in the recording and tallying of votes; and Ireland, too, gave up on e-voting for virtually the same reason.
As for the US, in 2005 its Federal Election Commission came up with a report detailing its electronic voting system for the public. It took 400 pages of explanation - but at least voters there have this in the public domain, whereas no guidelines exist in India. Even so, the situation in the US is complex, with individual states arriving at their own set of rules for voting - some have scrupulously kept e-voting out, some have resorted to a dual system.
Asserting that huge gaps existed in the safeguards, Saigal pointed out that the program code, once written and fused in the OTPROM (one-time programmable read-only memory), cannot be read back and altered by anyone, including the manufacturer. Therefore, the EC is merely dependent on the certification provided by the manufacturer - trust, and no verify.
K J Rao, a former EC official and one of India's best-known independent election experts, has pooh-poohed the claims made by Saigal. "The randomization procedure followed by the EC makes it impossible to tamper with the EVMs. No one knows which batch of EVMs will land where and be used in which election. How can anyone possibly tamper with a machine? Besides, it is impossible to introduce a chip inside the system without breaking it."
After being pilloried over its prized possession, the EC finally brought out its EVMs for a demonstration. Fortunately for the EC, neither Hari Prasad, Saigal or an independent Hyderabad-based election watch body that joined the queue of complainants turned up to make their point. That is, demonstrate the said faults on the machine used by the EC - rather than on their own look-a-like EVMs.
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