APJ Abdul Kalam among top 3 icons to influence TN voters

Chennai: Barely five years ago, in the run-up to the 2011 Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu, not many may have known that a father figure and people’s goodwill ambassador like former President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, had hugely contributed from the margins to pull out citizens, particularly youth, from the morass of voter apathy and cynicism.  

Arrow back in time and one sees the 2011 Assembly elections was a landmark poll: For the State was then emerging from its ‘cash-for-votes’ syndrome, better known as the ‘Tirumangalam formula’ since a by-election was held in that Madurai suburb in January 2009 under the earlier DMK regime. Its shadows lengthened even later during the Lok Sabha poll that year and subsequent by-elections.

But this Kalam record is no hype. You have it from the horse’s mouth, from a little known study done by the Election Commission of India (ECI) itself, which prior to the May 2011 Assembly elections had asked the ‘Indian Council of Market Research (ICMR) to do a baseline survey on the Knowledge, Attitude, Behaviour and Practice (KABP)’ of voters.

The idea was to get inputs to fine-tune EC’s ‘Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP)’ programme to improve the overall voting percentage in the general elections. The initiative, going by the ‘Narrative Report on the General Election to the Tamil Nadu Assembly, 2011’, was in the backdrop of the overall voting percentage in Tamil Nadu “generally” hovering between 50 per cent to 73 per cent, barring few exceptions. Hence, ‘SVEEP’ was modified to attract more people to the polling booths, “especially the urban and rural youth”.

The partially completed ICMR survey had come out with some disturbing revelations. For example, it found, contrary to popular notions, that youth voters could tilt poll outcomes as the highest among ‘non-voting persons’ in Tamil Nadu was found to be in the age group of 18-34 between the 2006 Assembly and 2009 Lok Sabha polls.

And 75 per cent of the ‘non-voters’ were from the group of working, self-employed and business persons. As economic liberalisation created more jobs and opportunities outside the government system, this voter apathy fell in place, though there were other reasons too like non-enrollment and not having ‘EPIC’ cards.

Simultaneously, the EC that year did a ‘SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the election scenario in Tamil Nadu also. While the State’s high literacy rates and “very high penetration” of newspapers, TV and cinema as vehicles of information to the people in the rural areas too were found to be among the ‘strengths’ of the electoral system, one ‘weakness’ it found was “high expectations for competitive bribing by political parties”.

Factoring all these inputs, ‘SVEEP’ was radically restructured by the EC ahead of the 2011 Assembly polls. The impact of the voter awareness campaigns, unleashed at multiple levels, was felt when the percentage of polling in the Assembly polls then touched a new high of 78.29 per cent, against 70.82 per cent in the 2006 Assembly polls. Further, in 2011, almost 25,000 persons had opted for ‘NOTA’.

After the elections, the EC directed an ‘end-line survey’ to analyse the impact of ‘SVEEP’. That was done through the Department of Evaluation and Applied Research of the Tamil Nadu government covering 5,000 sample respondents across 40 Assembly constituencies – 20 each of high turnout and low turnout constituencies-. That silent post-poll survey showed that the ‘messages’ that influenced voters much included, ‘my vote, my future’ and “Say ‘yes’ to Vote and ‘no’ to Note.”

And at the head of three icons, as the survey of both low and high turnout constituencies, found, who “influenced the voters most towards exercising their franchise” was the former President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, followed by celluloid actor Surya and the then CEO, Mr Praveen Kumar himself. The latter personally led the campaign by motivating all the officers who worked with him, what with district collectors like U. Sagayam in Madurai giving a refreshingly new touch to the ‘why vote’ campaign among the youth.    

The overall conclusion of the end-line survey was that that the ‘Voters Education campaign’ had played a big role, “resulting in higher voter turnout”. A similar exercise was done before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls too and fine-tuning the parameters from each poll experience, the EC now has pitched for an ambitious cent per cent polling.

The role of such icons like Dr Kalam, though not profiled in the electoral context so far, has thus shown the other apolitical side of ‘charisma’ in politics, more so in Tamil Nadu where cinema and politics crisscross each other’s domains from time to time.

The German thinker, Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the greatest sociologists of modern times, described ‘charisma’ as something referring to an “extraordinary power” that changes the rules of the game in a ‘revolutionary’ upheaval as it were. As a form of ‘authority’ impacting social choices, ‘charisma’ is different from both bureaucratic-rationalist-rule-bound authority and the traditional ‘religious’ authority as exercised in feudal societies, argued Weber.

At the same time, Weber pointed out that charisma, “cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditonalised or rationalised, or a combination of both.” And this is what makes it all the more “difficult to transfer charismatic authority to a successor”, a point to ponder for those deriding ‘dynastic politics’ at both the State and Central levels.

In the absence of non-political charismatic icons like Dr Kalam and senior-most political leaders like the 93-year-old veteran DMK general secretary Prof K. Anbazhagan, who could mentor and influence leadership succession by their scholarly standing, bidding adieu to electoral politics this time, Tamil Nadu’s political scene faces the same dilemmas of ‘charisma’ that Weber spoke about in a global context over 100 years ago!