The Bloodless Revolution

[THE VIEWS EXPRESSED HERE-IN ARE STRICTLY PERSONAL, AND DO NOT REFLECT THE VIEW OF ANY OFFICIAL ORGANIZATION.]

Having been born in the wrong sex, I shall never know what it feels like to birth a baby. However, I should guess that taking part in the management of a General Election in India might come very close. I must clarify at the beginning itself that I was not the part of the core machinery that actually conducted the elections. I like to think of myself, in the Game of Thrones analogy, as the High Lord of Bells and Whistles. I shall dwell more on that later. However, I was privileged enough to be in close contact with the core team, and thus I can substantiate my statements with some level of authority. So, first of all, let me substantiate the child birth analogy.  There is the long period of considering and planning, and the contemplation of the sheer inevitability of it all. Then things start to gain momentum, as more and more of one’s time is diverted from the ‘regular’ things that one is supposed to do, towards the Election efforts. Soon the ‘appearance’ starts changing – the Revenue Administration Officials shed their ‘peacetime’ designations and don the election related designations – the Collector & District Magistrate becomes the ‘District Election Officer’ in most of his/her correspondences and addresses. Then one find day, it is ‘announced’ to the world at large, though they may have already known it, for some time! The last month and a half are especially torturous – days and nights merge into one for the personnel involved – tempers become short, patience runs thin, and in the end, most of us do not care what the result is – we just want it to be over. Finally, on the poll day, the most painful of all, the process finally culminates, and the team falls back, exhausted, but satisified with what has been achieved. My profession also does not allow me to watch seaborne attacks of the type that felled Pearl Harbour - but watching the polling parties form, train, load, depart, perform and return to the base came quite close.

How did the simple process which, in its most basic form, should be as simple as a show of hands, become so similar to a war level mobilization. Is everything being done right? Or do we need to make some fundamental changes in the way we do these things. That is what is going to be delved into in the rest of this article.

The Tail of the Dove

Suppose you are on a long distance journey on a train, and you have a confirmed berth, which you have paid for, and are justifiably relaxing on. At a wayside station, a commuter gets in – this is a common scene on various routes passing through the Hindi Heartland. He requests you to kindly make room for him to sit, as he is going to the next station, some half an hour ahead. Some may be annoyed, but most of us, being groomed in the Indian ways, would let him have his seating space. After all, it is just for the next half an hour. The guy may actually provide an interesting experience. Let us tweak the scenario a little bit. What if the commuter then demands that you feed him out of your victuals, and let him have your blanket and sheets, and that he intends to ride out for some 5-6 hours, and not the half an hour he had promised.  What if as soon as the commuter alights, another commuter comes in, with the same ingratiating smile, and the same promises as before. What if your whole journey becomes a long party, where you keep hosting these commuters, at short intervals.  Further, what if your whole family of three was having to make do with a single berth that you had got confirmed with difficulty, and hosting the commuter was actually making you and your family very uncomfortable. Finally, what if the commuter has asked for your berth not on the basis of a request, but on authority, and you have to accommodate him, kicking your kids to the compartment floor in order to make way.

Elections, in most places, are part time events, organized and run by the lower level administration, with only the basic framework being designed by the National or State Election Bodies. Our own laws were framed with something similar in mind. Elections were the first area in which the now much abused concept of ‘dovetailing’ was used – using the resources of the local machinery for the various functions of the election – as creating a separate infrastructure for holding election woud have been very cost inefficient. However, with the passing of time, given the peculiar situation in which an average Indian voter resides, the process of holding elections has come way past being a part time affair. In fact, the core process of election – taking nomination, preparation of the ballot paper and the voting machines, the setting up of booths, the dispatch and reception of the polling parties, the actual conduct of the polling, and the counting – the backbone on which the elections are held, are actually taking less than half of the human effort that goes into conduct of elections these days. With the renewed emphasis on the deepening of democracy, the electoral registration process has evolved from being the ‘counter in the office’ enterprise to a full scale outreach program, that may well run for more than 5-6 months in a year. For this exercise, various government and quasi government employees are drafted as Booth Level Officers (BLO) – one of most thankless jobs ever designed. For the whole duration the electoral registration is open, this guy must work part-time in the evenings, beyond his day job, and on the weekends, making visits to the locality to get the potential electors to get enrolled. Potential electors who are finicky – who might not be able or willing to produce all the documents needed for their registration, but still who would not desist from questioning the integrity and affiliations of the BLO when any senior officer comes visiting. These BLOs have to work for almost all Sundays over this 5-6 months period, for a princely sum of Rs.5000 as ‘honorarium’ – because it is technically an ‘honorary volunteer’ service that they are rendering. Similarly, the whole of the Revenue department machinery has to work on the back end of this system, without even the pacifier of an honorarium. As the election approaches nearer, the basic work of the Revenue administration is displaced by Election work. The grievance redressal fora close first, the courts next. The monitoring of the government Departments goes out of the window, as the Departments themselves are converted into one or the other charges related to Election. The PDS system gives up all work to arrange the fuelling of Election Vehicles, the Education Department becomes the Booth and Polling Personnel Department, with the SSA and RMSA functionaries manning civil engineering projects to rectify the schools upto the EC standards! Some of the Block Resource Persons (teachers who are supposed to be master in their subjects and are appointed to teach the government teachers to close any gaps in the teachers’ knowledge base) actually complained that since their joining, they have actually worked more hours on election duty than the hours they have put in their core job! Given the fact that the Election Commission plans to get more proactive in the coming times, may be it is the time to consider a dedicated workforce for Election work, on which the non-core work, such as enrolment, and motivation and facilitation, can be given off. There are a number of adequately qualified persons who would be willing to take this job for the sum on the offer, and their services can be at reviewed on the basis of the fidelity of the electoral roll under his command. This, of course, would require an amendment in the statutes. However, if more involvement is the need of the hour, then these steps definitely need to be taken, for the dovetailing can be done only as long as the tail does not get larger than the dove itself!

The great Bull Whip & the Cat-o-nine-tails

Election is perhaps the only time, other than a national emergency, when, in effect, the administrative machinery of the State takes up a unitary form instead of a Federated one. All the DEOs, and the staff under them, get deputed to the Election Commission, who control them through the office of the Chief Electoral Officer of the state concerned. Everyday, mails rain down from Delhi to the State Capitals, from where they are rained down to the DEOs, and from there to the various Officers incharge of the subjects. The Commission, it appears, is a rather shuffling commander for such a multitier army. First of all, there is no management by setting of objectives. The top decides both the objectives and the methodology by which it shall be achieved. To make it more interesting, it can change either at the drop of a hat. Students of supply chain management shall recall The Bullwhip effect. How asymmetry of information sharing along a multitiered supply chain can lead to huge fluctuations in stocks at every level. In case of bull whip effect, the entry point of the information is in the lower levels, with the upper tiers responding to it. In the case of electoral command chain, it is the lower tier responding to the changing command from the top – so the maximum fluctuation occurs at the more fragile end of the string. Plus, there are multiple ‘lower ends’ – each fluctuating at a different phase, depending on what it was doing at the time the latest information change came up. More than a whip, it resembles the legendary cat-o-nine tails! Corresponding to the ‘over stocks’ in the Bullwhip effect, we see a huge amount of effort and resources go waste, and corresponding to the out of stock situations, we see situations not covered by any arrangement, with the things moving on a wing and a prayer! Some of my senior colleagues have suggested that we should be prepared for such last minute changes and be agile enough, like the Armed Forces, who never question the command of the hierarchy. I beg to differ. While it is alright to be prepared and agile, we are not dealing with live, changing combat, but with a planned exercise; an inevitable, periodic exercise. While the foot soldiery is agile enough to change its steps according to the news beats, it is hard to make a non-suspicious paper trail in the reports! When everything would be audited in the course of 3-5 years, and all the contracts and orders made in compliance with the directives are studied, no one shall recall the sense of urgency under which those decisions were made. 

The Unending Event & The Model

As far as Event Management goes, there is perhaps no bigger event than an Indian General Election, with around 800 million eligible participants, out of which upwards of half a billion actually do take part.  However, this is one event with a difference. Normally event management is about paucity of time. Ask any event manager who is overseeing the preparations for a big event, and he would say that he would never have enough time for it. However, during the conduct of elections (and for a month of two prior to that), except for the core team, most of the others in the election work would rather find that the time has become stagnant! The reason for this is the oft lauded Model Code of Conduct (MCC), which is enforced across the areas in which the elections are supposed to be held, from the period of announcement of elections till the end of all election related activities. What exactly is this MCC? In its purest form, the MCC is a gentleman’s agreement between the various political parties and the EC – a list of ‘thou shall not’s of the parties and the candidates to follow during the period. How is the same enforced? Well, there is no legal way to enforce the MCC as such. The EC has not armed itself with any court powers, through which it can haul the violators for breach. It so happens that many of the items prohibited under the MCC are also offences under various Acts, such as the IPC, the Motor Vehicles Act, the Representation of Peoples Act. The MCC simply requires the District Administration to go for registration of cases against the violators.

While the MCC at its heart is a good deal, the idea of its selective enforcement at the time of Elections creates a problem for everyone. As one of my batchmates puts it – “While in peacetime, we speak of political interference in administrative matters, in the election time, via the MCC enforcement, we see administrative interference into political matters!” While the issue of voter bribery, intimidation of voters and the administrative machinery are important issues which need to be dealt with a firm hand, some issues like the ban on posters and hoardings, and the regulation of meetings are clearly not cost effective in terms of ‘clearing up the politics’. A lot of time and effort of the election team is wasted on the removal of these harmless election publicity work – which is ironical, considering that the Administration is then expected to step in the arena to plaster the city with its own set of posters, banners, and hold its own set of public meetings and rallies, under the SVEEP program, to create the ‘election buzz’ that one of its arms has been forced to kill! More troubling is the idea that most of these offences form a part of the MCC, which is enforced only during the election period – thus effectively implying and admitting that their prohibition cannot be enforced in non-election periods. What makes their enforcement possible during the election period?  Just one reason – that for the time the MCC is in effect, the whole administrative machinery is under deputation to the EC, and not to the elected government (which is populated by the very political players against whom the MCC is to be enforced), in the sense that transfers / postings and administrative action against them can be carried out only by the EC. Ordinarily, the political executive should concern itself with the framing of the policies, and the permanent executive with the implementation of those policies. However, in our country, this ideal is observed more in violation. However, since we do have a model that does works, why not extend it to the normal working days, where the transfers and administrative actions are taken on merit by a real statutory body, and not on the whims and fancies of the political executive. That would ensure that there need not be any ‘model code of conduct’ for elections, separate from the ‘real code of conduct’ for the normal life, and it would be much easier, for all persons involved, to both enforce and follow it. Right now, on the name of enforcement, officials are made to go overboard in actually hounding the political candidates, and to find out headline making recoveries of cash or booze, and to slap cases against the candidates, while under the full knowledge that once the MCC ends, all the criminal cases lodged would die a natural death in the absence of someone following them, and the ‘enforcers’ would be at the mercy of the ‘enforced upon’! No wonder that for many, the days spent chest puffing under the name of MCC do drag long. Hence, there is a need to imbibe the major part of the MCC in the daily political life to the country, and to cast off the dregs.

Observer Effect

Peter Drucker has said – what gets measured, gets managed. In the case of elections, however, there is a more apt adage – what gets over measured, gets micromanaged! No, this isn’t about the Commission’s Observers, who come to observe whether the election is being conducted the way it is supposed to be conducted. It is about the way incessant monitoring by the higher command ends up being an end in itself. In Physics, there is a phenomenon known as the Observer effect – how, at a quantum level,the act of measurement itself is powerful enough to alter the measured entityquite substantially. It is very much prevalent in the business of conducting elections. There is a report to be prepared for almost everything that is ever done in the course of election efforts – there are even reports about reports being sent – not kidding! If the sampling method of work-study is taken, a rough estimate would be that around 95% of the time at the District Headquarter Level and around 60-70% at the lower level is utilized solely for preparing a transferring up information in various tables, formats and media. That too under a scenario where the job required to be done changes within hours – in the morning you have a mail to do something ‘urgently’, and then, by the afternoon, a completely contradictory mail comes, prohibiting the same with vengeance. While in the core job, the reports are quite necessary and help the machinery keep time with the grand objective, in the non-core functions, some of the subjects of the reports border on absurd. In MCC related issues, there are reports about the amount of liquor seized daily, and of what type, and in what quantity. How is this relevant – how much whiskey was caught yesterday in some god forsaken part of the nation? Even more curious is expecting a report on this daily, rather than counting it as a one off phenomenon that it should be and is. Then there are reports about the implementation of the Voter Awareness (SVEEP) programs – hilarious. How many gender specific advertisements were inserted in local newspapers? How many people participated in your last rally? The trouble is, in some cases, doing the thing measured was easier than writing a report on them. And then there was the question of ‘periodical online feeding’ – it sounded and appeared like offering some tribute to some mythical demon for feeding. The problem is that in Election (as in almost all facets of schemes and projects being implemented by a large scale workforce, like the MNREGS), the central authorities have made MIS systems for their own convenience. Thus, sitting anywhere in the country, one can monitor the macro level progress of the works – how much premium Scotch whiskey was apprehended in the Haryana today, and how many south facing youth appealing posters were put up in Nagaland this week! These may be touted as models of e-governance, but they are as much e-governance as a palanquin borne by slave boys is an automobile. For an e-governance project to be feasible, it should have end to end connectivity, which needs money. None of the cutting edge level workers, who are seizing the booze, or are putting up those SVEEP hoardings, are given the equipment or training to post the details online. So most of these projects rely on scores of persons slaving away at the keyboard day and night, to maintain the fidelity of the online information. Often, there is a break in the information flow, when the person doing the work gets so busy doing the work to be sending the data for feeding. Then, in desperation, as the deadline for the day’s feeding approaches, someone among the minions realizes that no one is actually reading the data they are compiling, and even if somebody is reading it, it would not really make a difference if they think that 50 litre of booze was confiscated instead of 30. Then we arrive at the new adage – “Whatever gets measured, gets concocted.” The great wagon of election rolls on meanwhile, scarcely caring.

The Lord Giveth, and the Lord Taketh Away

The one thing about elections in India is that every time a new election is held, the Commission garners favourable reviews from the public at large. This rides on the phenomenon of a conscious effort on the part of the Commission to make a positive image of itself, harnessing the same infrastructure which the governments have used to build quite a negative image of themselves. However, like the governments or the courts, even the election authorities have not been able to resist the urge to let our ideals write checks our reality cannot cash. This indeed is a national malady - seeing ourselves, as a whole, to be much more prosperous than we really are. Having our ideals is a good thing, and striving to achieve them is noble. However, tying ourselves to them – or as Sir Humphrey Appleby said in ‘Yes Minister’ – nailing our pants to the mast, is never a good idea. It is these unfeasible ideas that make our officials, who are the cream of the intelligentsia of the nation, appear ridiculous in public by a media whose level of intelligence and understanding is much lower. Courts have been steadily expanding the definition of right to life – recently it expanded to include a half a million rupees a month therapy for the some rare genetic disease, on public funds! Governments have been legislating the same into justiciable rights, never mind the fact that the funds for the same have to be diverted from functions that were deemed very essential once. Similarly, the election authorities have enjoined upon the District Election officers the responsibility for providing all booths with ‘Basic Minimum Facilities’. While it is definitely a good thing to ask for, we must ask ourselves one simple question – where do these polling booths come from? The answer is simple. The ‘day job’ of these buildings is to function as schools; schools of the same area which the booths set up therein shall service to. The second question that then comes to our mind is this – do these booths, which work for one or two days in a year, need these ‘Basic Minimum Facilities’ more than the schools, which function 365x5-5 days (subtracting the days of polling for the various elections). This is a simple question, and has only one correct answer. You can have only as good or bad booths as you have schools. There must be some very deep unresolved issues if the schools are not having the facilities yet – sheer lack of budget, lack of requirement, or vandalism unfettered by a law enforcement arm which has had its teeth muzzled by the courts. Yet, countless reminders have come to all DEOs to ensure that their booths have these facilities, without any details about the paymaster who shall foot the bill. In fact there are multiple directives that require quite substantial expenditure on the part of the District Authorities – videography, webcasting, hosting of ‘celebrities’ for SVEEP, etc. Most of the demands from top conveniently forget to mention the budget. Bills for tentage, videography, vehicles used in the last election are still being cleared gradually, as the budget is received sporadically. The contractors are unwilling to take up election related work – they do so only to avoid the ‘displeasure’ of the District Administration – and only the persons on this side know how hollow that displeasure has become over the years. Some of the more well-read contractors have hauled Collectors / DEOs to Courts, and have got orders for stopping the salaries of the incumbents as long as their bills are not cleared! In fact PSUs like the BSNL have issued a strict letter to all their units to give any facility to the Election Machinery only after taking advance payment.  People speak about limiting the expenditure by the candidates to the election by allowing for public funding of elections. In reality, the state of public finances available for election is so poor that the candidates could very well fund the public expenditure on the election works after allocating their own budgetary requirements!  In obedience of the command of the authorities, the work was done – with no questions asked about the viability and longevity of the work done. How the bill was footed – ask no questions and hear no lies. On top of this, the authorities have the heart to ask the districts to prepare some ideal booths, that go beyond the minimum facilities, and make the voters feel like guests! As the High Lord of Bells and Whistles, this fell under my charge. So, here is how it happened. A few privately run schools ‘volunteered’ for the task. They ‘arranged’ for the red carpeting and the flowery decoration and the tentage. Their scouts ‘volunteered’ to stand in a guard of honour for the voters. The Commission got their day in the papers and news.

SVEEPing the Polls

As the High Lord of Bells and Whistles, I was heading the Systematic Voter Education and Electoral Participation, or, in short, SVEEP program. No, it was not designed to be a bells and whistles program.  As the full title suggests, it was an effort taken up by the Commission to raise the flagging voter participation after observing the voter turnout data in the elections held in the last decade. It is true that the greatest threat to a democracy does not come from an external usurper, but from the slow internal withering away due to mass apathy. Thus, it was clearly that the voter participation had to be increased somehow. What this ‘somehow’ was to be has been a contentious topic. As far as I can see from the data, the major abstainees from the electoral process are the urban voters, who, registered in one part of the country, move to some other part, for studies, for work, and similar pursuits. Our current electoral system ties down a person to a particular booth – if he is not there on the day of the polling, he is not allowed to vote, unless he is one of the few privileged ones to hold the postal ballot or proxy vote, and believe me, the price of that privilege is way too high. Then, there was definitely the issue of political disenchantment of the middle class, who started viewing politics as an area best left to the politicians. Voting day is a paid holiday, and it takes tremendous will power for the middle and upper class to spend it standing in a queue with 1000 of the sweating, underclass, in a ramshackle building, which has a hole in the broken pot for a toilet, and a hand pump nearby for drinking water, to exercise their franchise. So, there were three clear lines of action – 1. To start, at a fundamental level, to design a process of voting that uses the modern technology to free a large number of migrating urban voters from the confines of the booth, 2. To improve the infrastructure at the booths to the extent possible – as has been explained in the preceding sections, it is not very much possible to fundamentally transform the physical infrastructure of the booth, 3. To make the idea of voting ‘cool’. The Commission, however, took up only the last two routes, totally side stepping the first, and according to most of our judgements and surveys (yes, we did that too!), the most effective step. Was it really so difficult? This year 18 Crore were allotted to SVEEP – all for the programs under the third step – information, education and communication. On the similar scale, the election Commission of Gujarat had rolled out an onlinevoting system, spending Rs.37 Crores only. The impact a similar initiative at the national level could have had would have been dramatic. There are many detractors of online voting – saying that it could lead to booth capturing on a large scale via hacking. All I have to offer is that if we can trust the internet with our life's savings and with transactions worth millions, we may very well offer it a chance to record our mandate. Well, leaving aside this point, we shall see what happened of the two other lines of actions, that had been proposed by the Commission. Somehow, down the line, even the booth facilitation point was sacrificed on the altar of the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ – there simply was no way to make a polling booth seem like a place to be and hang around – except for a few booths made into ‘Ideal Booths’. So finally, it was all about information and motivation. For that, as prescribed by the powers that be, we went for rallies of students, face painting, body painting, sand painting, road painting, wall painting, poster competition, poetry competition, meet and greet programs. It was tough, initially. Then we started sharing our reports with the media houses. The media houses were doing voter awareness and motivation programs of their own, and in a much better way than we could have ever thought of doing. We joined their program, lending an official endorsement to their unofficial program. Were we able to educate the average voter about to exercise the right to vote? I’m not sure. We made the flexi boards, the posters, the leaflets, the media insertions, and even hogged the interval display in the cinema halls. Still, on the day of the poll, we received a number of calls from various places, from well-educated persons, who insisted they should be allowed to vote since they held an Electoral Photo Identity Card EPIC – even if they did not have their name in the rolls! Did I fail? I am again not so sure. Many of these persons who were impervious to my teachings would almost surely be ignorant many other things – the name of the Vice President, the number of Fundamental Rights – it is a fact that the average person is hard to educate, especially when he is not overtly paying out of pocket for the education. So, in the end, it all degenerated to bell and whistles, as I had said earlier – rallies, posters, song and dance. In fact, under the searing gaze of the powers that be, there began a panicky race for holding the most humongous events, that could plaster the newspapers the next day – a thousand kid rally one day, a 25 km long human chain the next day. There is an express Commission directive prohibiting the school kids from being used by the District Administration in these events. However, they have left a loop hole – it does not forbid the school itself from doing these things, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the schools always ‘volunteer’. This is justified by saying that we are simply creating a buzz for the coming polls – in hindi – ‘chunaav ka maahaul bana rahe hain’. Well, if it was finally about creating the buzz, then we are going the wrong way. First of all, we removed and destroyed all the promotional displays of the parties and candidates – which were much more colourful and emotive than the sanitized version of buzz that we are constrained to create. Then we prohibited them from holding rallies, and took out our own. We restricted their carcades, and we took out our own car rallies. The idea that a set of non-political administrators, with a bunch of ‘volunteer’ students and some 1.2 Lakh rupees at their command could create a wave for voting for the NOTA option (we cannot endorse candidates, or even issues and agenda), in a way better than the hugely motivated candidates can, with their officially sanctioned budgets of Rs.70 Lakh per candidate, asking for a vote for their ideologies and manifestos, shows a level of naivete beyond description. In the end, the vote percentage in my District rose by 11% and in the Constituency by 10%, and I got a lot of congratulatory messages. Do I deserve that? Most probably no. There has been an almost uniform rise in voting percentage by around the similar numbers in all the constituencies in the area. This rise is evident in even those Districts where the SVEEP program was struggling to take off properly even as close as a week back, as was evident from the uncomfortable looks on the faces of their officials in the SVEEP video conferences! Most probably this rise is creditable to the unfortunate events that occurred around a year back, which led to greater polarization of the votes. Then again, the timings for the polling have been increased, leading to more time for the people to exercise their franchise. In order to judge whether SVEEP, or what was not lost of it on the way down in the translation, was effective, we needed to have some Districts as control groups, where no SVEEP programs would have been held. A statistically significant deviation in the change of percentage would have been evidence of efficacy. Well, for now, I consider the fact that the job I am in in such that both the brickbats (which are far more numerous) and bouquets, are mostly undeserved. So I gracefully accept the congratulations for now, for the tide shall surely turn, sooner or later.

Epilogue

Whatever I have written till now would sound like a one-sided rant against the system. It is partially true – the readers have the mainstream media to turn to for the ‘brighter side’ of the election process – the Discovery Channel is making a mega documentary on the LS Elections 2014 – including a pointed coverage of the summit battle at the Varanasi seat. This article was meant as a supplementary piece – to give the perspective from the side of the machinery that toils hard to ensure the elections are successful – the symbolic human sacrifice that must be buried in the Foundation of any magnificent edifice. Even bigger than our toil is the toil done by the security forces, that move around the length and breadth of states and nations, on short notice – their story would be even more fascinating, and must be told by someone among their ranks, someday.  And no, we are not making too much of our discomfort, because we know it is not too big a price for what we are undergoing. Through these 2-3 months of exercise, we might end up over throwing a government that has been ruling over 1.3 billion people; or, we might end up thwarting a challenge to the seat of power by a new contender. The students of history will appreciate that traditionally the change of power even in bands of nomads some 100 persons strong led to copious bloodshed. The sheer fact that a group 1.3 Billion strong would get a new government through an almost bloodless revolution makes all the discomfort and pain fade away. This is history in the making, and I am very thankful to the powers in this realm and beyond for making me such a close witness.