Death polls The violence that accompanied the first phase of Bihar's assembly elections has proven grimly true to the general sense of foreboding. About 21 persons have been killed and 50 injured. Only a little more than half the electorate across 108 constituencies have voted. Widespread irregularities - booth capturing, rigging, disruptive conflicts between parties - have always been part of Bihar's heavily criminalized electoral tradition. But the situation in the state has acquired another dimension since the 1998 Lok Sabha elections, with the increasingly violent enforcement of the poll boycott called by the extremist Naxalite groups, the Maoist Communist Centre and the People's War Group. The number of deaths has been steadily rising: 44 in the 1998 and 64 in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. The only reason behind the fewer casualties this year is the heavy rain that prevented some of the Naxalites' landmines from going off. The terror caused by these groups, particularly in their strongholds in south and central Bihar, has succeeded in preventing more than 65 per cent of the people in these areas from coming out to vote. Two aspects of the Naxalites' mode of operation this time are significant. First, their main targets seem to be the police, security personnel and poll workers. In spite of the police department's assurance of being 'fully equipped and prepared' to ensure 'free and fair polling' and the Election Commission's satisfaction with these preparations, the security arrangements remained inadequate. The Naxalites have, by now, become experts with landmines, trained by their comrades in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Bihar's landmine detection squads came nowhere near to matching this expertise. Even after offering lucrative insurance and assured jobs, the state government found it difficult to rope in the terrified Home Guards for election duty. Second, the extremists seem to have extended their stronghold, striking beyond their usual terrain. In Rohtas, an entire patrol vehicle was blown up, killing eight people. Quite obviously, what ought to be a normal process within a functioning democracy has become, in Bihar, nothing less than a major armed battle, the management of which is beyond the capacity of its law and order enforcing institutions. The EC can only distance itself in despair from such a concerted failure of everything that democratic governance ought to stand for.