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During the Delhi Assembly elections last December, candidates contesting from the bustling but downmarket Seemapuri constituency underwent an unfamiliar grilling ordeal. At a public function organised by an NGO, Parivartan, they were quizzed by prospective voters on how they planned to spend their funds, if elected to the legislative assembly. Most of them didn’t have a clue.
One candidate was asked, “What will you do if our jhopdis are demolished?” He replied, “I will lie down before the bulldozer.” When asked again, “Where were you when they demolished those jhopdis on the other side of the road?,” he was sheepish and tongue-tied.
The trial was not over. At the end of the meeting, all candidates were made to sign an affidavit saying that they would not spend a single paisa from the MLA’s development fund without consulting the people.
Around the same time, in the dust bowls of Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district, a similar scene was being enacted. At a jan manch or public platform, candidates from every party sat quietly before a gathering of 800-odd people as affidavits of their assets were read out. When the affidavits did not match with their lifestyle — “This guy claims he doesn’t own a car. But whose Qualis is he seen driving then?” — the crowd murmured in disapproval. The candidates only squirmed in their seats.
These are but two instances of an election watch movement gaining momentum across the country. In states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, even Bihar, concerned citizens groups, NGOs and other civil society organisations are joining hands to build a more transparent electoral system and create more involved and effective citizen participation in the coming Lok Sabha elections. Used and dumped by politicians for decades, the citizen is finally demanding his pound of flesh.
These days, when politics is generally equated with gutter and stink, when the middle-class is indifferent to polls and the new generation thinks it is cool to be apolitical, the election watch campaign is an effort to get the silent majority involved.
The campaigns don’t tell you which party to vote for. Instead, they provide the voter with a complete careergraph — financial, educational as well as criminal (if any) — of the candidate. Organising meet-your-candidate events, making contestants appear for a constituency awareness test, getting bogus voters erased from the electoral rolls and including the valid ones that are missing, monitoring electoral expenses — the election watch groups are doing it all. “We will also try to get a good turn-out. Thousands of volunteers will go from building to building, home to home on the voting day,” says Sharad Kumar of Agni, a Mumbai-based election watch group.
Agni will collect the affidavits submitted by the candidates to the returning officers, compile and summarise them in a reader-friendly fashion and pass them to the voters through public meetings, newsletters, e-mails and the mass media. In Karnataka too, the candidates’ declared assets will be put in the public domain through the media.
There’s some variety and fun in these campaigns too. The Rajasthan Election Watch plans to bring out cassettes with songs eulogising the importance of voting. Plays and debates highlighting the importance of the electoral process will be organised in towns and villages. “Besides, our video cameras will keep track of the number of cars being used by the candidates and the kind of speeches they are delivering. We will have 10 field workers in each district,” says Girish Sharma of Rajasthan Election Watch.
In fact, Agni, which stands for Association for Good Governance and Networking in India and has about 300 citizens groups and NGOs in its fold, has come out with a comprehensive citizens’ manifesto. The manifesto lays down what the six members of Parliament can do for Mumbai in areas such as creation of jobs, housing, transport, environment and governance. “Irrespective of the political party they represent, we want the elected candidates to work as a team in these priority sectors,” says Kumar.
Election watch groups have been around for some years. Senior Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan, who has been associated with the Delhi Election Watch, recalls that an initial effort was made in seven constituencies during the 1993 Delhi state Assembly polls. “Since disclosure was not mandatory those days, a team of 21 students went to the constituencies and ferreted out information about the candidates — their background, their record of public service, their assets — from a variety of sources. The subsequent report was distributed to the press,” says Bhushan. Civil rights group Lok Satta also organised an election watch campaign in Andhra Pradesh in 1999.
But it was the Supreme Court judgment of March 2003 which made such disclosure from candidates mandatory that gave a boost to the fledgling election watch movement. During the 2002 Gujarat state Assembly polls and the 2003 state assembly polls in Rajasthan, the election watch campaign was carried out on a larger scale.
Many startling facts came to light. A random survey of five polling booths in a Delhi constituency showed that 19 per cent of the names were bogus and 20 per cent names missing. “The discrepancy was as high as 39 per cent,” says Arvind Kejriwal of Parivartan, the NGO which conducted the survey.
The impact of the election watch campaign, however, has been marginal so far. “It is still in a preliminary stage,” says Bhushan, though Kumar points out that as a result of increasing awareness, the voting percentage went up from 12 per cent to 33 per cent in Mumbai’s Malabar Hills ward in the last municipal elections.
Psephologist Yogendra Yadav says, “In the short-term, such a movement will create pressure on candidates to stay clean. And in the long term, it will contribute to creating a cleaner political environment.”
At a time when top political parties are waging an intense competitive battle to get more film stars, the election watch campaign is striving to bring the focus back on real issues. As Kumar puts it succinctly, “We want to act as a pressure group. We want to make the middle class get interested in the electoral process. And we want voting people to think and thinking people to vote.”