The right button

In a few days, I will go into a polling booth with untainted hands, and emerge a few minutes later with a black stain on my forefinger to show the world that I have exercised my franchise. Between going in and coming out, I will have faced an Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and — hopefully — pressed the right button. Which begs the question, what is the right button?

Before we go into that, let us acknowledge something we all take for granted, which in a sense, is a measure of its success: the (generally) peaceful, (almost always) orderly conduct of the elections by the Election Commission. But just because the process is smooth, we should at least acknowledge the enormity of the operation.

The 2014 elections (the plural is apt considering its geographical spread and the many stages in which it takes place), is our biggest ever election.
What does that mean? It means — and this really needs underlining — it’s the largest ever exercise in free and fair voting in the history of mankind!
Just look at the numbers. There are now 815 million eligible voters. To enable them all to vote, 1.5 million polling booths are required with that many EVMs. An army of 11 million people — government servants and teachers pressed into elections service — is required to supervise and conduct the process.

Booth capturing and poll-related violence is kept under control by paramilitary forces, video surveillance, and what the Election Commission call Vulnerability Mapping. That’s almost certainly why at this halfway stage, reports of disruption are few and far between.

One other feather in the EC’s cap is the success of its awareness drive: leading to the elections, it conducted these programmes in camps throughout the country, resulting in the registration of 120 million new voters, mainly the young coming of voting age, and importantly, women who were quite often left out of the process either through ignorance or coercion.

How will they vote? One opinion poll said that urban woman voters preferred the Congress over the Bharatiya Janata Party by a margin of two per cent, but that was more than offset by the large nine per cent male preference for the BJP. The poll didn’t give figures for rural women: it would be interesting to see if the Gandhi bahu was considered a better option than the macho “56 inch chest” thumping Narendra Modi. The same opinion poll said that 32 per cent Hindu voters preferred the BJP to 23 per cent for the Congress, while Muslims favoured the Congress by a large 31 per cent margin. But these are only a few of the many factors that influence our elections, caste and even sub castes playing very important roles.

When you are alone in the polling booth facing an EVM, these polls (and sometimes your own expressed opinion) count for naught. This is especially so in rural areas, where men and women are often wary of confiding their preferences to strangers with clipboards and charts — can they be trusted to not rat on them to local party workers? This is why our opinion polls so often go wrong.

Another obvious reason is the sheer size and heterogeneity of our electorate — to get an accurate picture, you would need a very large sample base, which would make these polls unaffordable to the media.

Back to the future. What will I do in the polling booth? I vote in south Mumbai, where the sitting member of Parliament is the Congress’ Milind Deora.

The Shiv Sena combine has put forward Arvind Sawant of the Sena, while the Aam Aadmi Party has Meera Sanyal, the banker-turned-political aspirant. In this particular case, the choice is made simple because Mr Deora has been an excellent, though quiet, MP and junior minister, who has diligently been trying to make a mark in Delhi. Ms Sanyal is an interesting option because she brings a wealth of international and financial experience with her, and our Lok Sabha would greatly benefit if there were more MPs like her. But my finger would press one particular button, even if the candidates were different. Let me explain.

From all indications, and in spite of Rahul Gandhi’s brave and overly optimistic projections, it’s clear that come May, we will have a National Democratic Alliance government in Delhi. The only uncertainty is how many of the NDA’s total seats will go to the BJP. Or, shall we say, to Mr Modi, since the party’s campaign has projected only him and downplayed itself to the point of near obscurity. That to me is the crux of the question.

The subjugation of the BJP’s identity, and the rough treatment given by Mr Modi to its functionaries (even the seniormost ones like L.K. Advani) reinforces his reputation as a man with dictatorial tendencies. By now this has been well documented and thoroughly discussed, including the very significant incident with Rajnath Singh.

Mr Singh had posted “Ab bari BJP ki sarkar”. Within minutes he was made to change that to “Ab bari Modi ki sarkar”.
Here we are not talking about some minor functionary, but the president of the BJP. And in case you have missed it, the Prime Minister in waiting has shown another dangerous trend — in all recent interactions with the media, he has begun to refer to himself in the third person: “Agar aap Modi ko kahenge…” That, as any psychologist will tell you, is not a good sign at all. It shows a tendency to put your perceived persona above your own self, a form of self-aggrandisement.

Given the near inevitability of Mr Modi’s elevation to the prime ministership, and the seeming inevitability of his larger-than-life projection of himself taking over, what is the voter to do? My solution is simple: if NDA is going to win, so be it. But it’s in the national interest to keep Mr Modi in check.

So one must vote for the Congress, or one of its United Progressive Alliance partners to ensure that the BJP doesn’t get a very large number of seats. That way, Mr Modi will have to work within the constraints of a coalition consisting of demanding partners.

I would have voted for Mr Deora anyway. Now I have a second reason to do so.