Author: Swagata Sen and Satarupa Bhattacharjya
Publication: India Today
Date: January 23, 2006
Fresh from its success in the Bihar polls,
the Election Commission wants to apply the same yardstick to the impending
elections in West Bengal. That is reason enough for the Left Front to feel
jittery.
To all the phrases doing the rounds during
elections, such as rigging and booth capturing, a new one has been added ahead
of the assembly polls in West Bengal: the Bihar model. Former chief minister
Jyoti Basu brushed aside the Election Commission's (EC) relentless preparations
for the forthcoming West Bengal assembly elections due in about four months,
saying, "Bengal is not Bihar." But the fact remains that the EC
does not use different yardsticks for different states.
So it didn't surprise many when a team of
19 pre-poll observers, including K.J. Rao, the hero of the recently held Bihar
elections, headed for West Bengal. Last week, the team surveyed Nadia district
to find the truth behind the opposition parties' claims of discrepancies in
electoral rolls across the state. Adding insult to injury, the Left Front
Chairman Biman Basu too admitted to large-scale presence of bogus voters in
the state.
The EC team, which has had to strike off bogus
voters' names by the dozen, lent a patient ear to people's complaints that
they were deprived of voting rights and were scared to move out of their houses
on polling days.
Nadia comprises large pockets of Bangladeshi
infiltrators who had migrated after the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. The Left Administration
has issued ration cards and voter identity cards to most of these residents,
allegedly to nurture an impenetrable vote bank. Going by the state food ministry's
admission, 19 lakh bogus ration cards were seized in 2005. Such discrepancies
have seen the Left, UPA's biggest ally, squirming in the face of electoral
vigilance. There is a growing realisation that after 28 years of uninterrupted
power, a seventh term may not be a cakewalk.
With the EC intent on implementing the Bihar
model, the Left's apprehensions look justified. Bihar saw what could safely
be termed a "free and fair election". Besides judiciously deploying
state and Central security forces, Rao travelled through the state to learn
about electoral malpractices and then set about trying to minimise them.
After Bihar, where the commission had deleted
as many as 18 lakh names from the electoral rolls and added about four lakh,
the EC officials have placed top priority to assessing West Bengal's genuine
voter base. They have declared that they are proceeding without any preconceived
notions, making clear their intentions to hold as transparent an election
as possible for the 294-seat legislature, whose term will expire on June 13.
"The commission wants to ensure that free and fair polls take place in
West Bengal so that average voters can feel confident and come out of their
houses to vote," says a commission official. "After the general
elections in 2004, the media was rife with reports of organised rigging in
West Bengal, but we are not approaching the state with preconceived notions,"
he adds. However, the stress on making the voter "confident" appears
to offer the impression that the commission is not taking the rumours lightly.
Earlier last year, media reports had mentioned that EC observers had reported
"glaring irregularities" during the 2004 Lok Sabha polls when 4,74,36,050
people had voted. The BJP and its ally Trinamool Congress demand that non-Bengali-speaking
election observers, preferably from outside the state, should conduct the
elections in May.
In many previous elections to the Lok Sabha,
Assembly and civic bodies, especially since their siege of Kolkata in 1977,
red soldiers have driven their parties to easy victories, which their opponents
often attribute to organised rigging. However, the 2006 bout may present a
challenge to the Left Front. Though at the political level the Communists
and their allies seem confident of defeating their main rival, the Congress,
and principal irritant, the Trinamool Congress, a battle of nerves with the
EC seems unavoidable.
The Trinamool Congress' junior partner in
the state, the BJP, which does not have a single MLA in the Assembly, has
petitioned the EC to remove state government employees from election coordination
committees as the roll revision gets under way. The Trinamool Congress-BJP
combine reiterates its old fear that a majority of the Left Front Government
employees are cadres of the Left parties and hence can manipulate the voters'
lists.
State BJP Secretary Tathagata Roy, along with
Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee, accuses the ruling coalition of patronising
illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. "The CPI(M) and its allies want to protect
non-genuine voters because it helps expand their prospective voters' list.
This is the reason illegal Bangladeshi immigrants figure in the electoral
rolls," says Roy adding that the BJP has requested the EC to remove the
state Government employees from coordination committees in the forthcoming
polls. Roy and Banerjee fear that the CPI(M) will install its own members
in the district-level committees for the roll revision exercise and this could
help the Left in the polls.
In the report that the Trinamool Congress
submitted to the EC complaining of irregularities, some of the poll figures
are so ridiculous that they leave no one in doubt about the way rigging or
booth capturing has been done in earlier elections. For example, in Keshpur,
which witnessed large-scale violence in the previous state polls, out of a
total of 1,33,000 votes cast, the Left candidate was declared winner by a
margin of 1,08,000 votes. In 50 booths of a particular area in the constituency,
the CPI(M) received between 412 and 1,049 votes, while there were less than
20 votes cast in favour of the Trinamool. In Goghat, another sensitive area,
a particular booth received 936 CPI(M) votes, with not a single vote for any
other party.
Similarly, in Garbeta, which is a poll-sensitive
constituency, there were 13 booths where the Trinamool received less than
10 votes while the CPI(M) got between 509 and 875 votes. In urban and semi-urban
areas as well, such as Purshura in Hooghly, a booth recorded 1,105 votes for
the CPI(M), while there was a lone vote for the Trinamool Congress. There
are thousands of such instances. Banerjee has actually documented these irregularities
in a book titled Abishashya (unbelievable).
Deployment of poll officers and additional
returning officers from outside West Bengal, Central police support, and elimination
of bogus id cards are just the beginning, says the Opposition. More important
is diminishing the subterfuge, where the CPI(M) cadres collect id cards in
entire constituencies and cast votes, or scare people into not going to the
polling booths. "There is pressure both from below and above. Their local
machinery spreads terror and the higher-ups control the state enforcement
agencies," says Roy.
According to speculation in Delhi's political
circles, the CPI(M) may ask the UPA Government to expand the ec to a five-member
panel instead of three prior to the Bengal polls, in a bid to decentralise
the commission. While Article 324 of the Constitution provides the Centre
the right to increase or reduce the strength of the commission, it is unlikely
that the Congress leadership will, at this stage, initiate such a move despite
being dependent on the Left for external support simply because any such move
could dent its public image.
State Youth Congress President Amitabha Chakraborty
remembers when he, as a student leader, represented his party as a booth agent
in the corporation elections in 1989: "They stuck a revolver in my mouth,
brought me out, and beat me half-dead."
Every Opposition leader in the state, from
the present Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Priyaranjan Dasmunshi
(who was spat upon during previous elections) to Madan Mitra of the Trinamool
(who was manhandled publicly), has similar stories to tell. One can only hope
there won't be more such stories in the May elections.
BENGAL GAZETTE
* The state's population in 2001 was 8.02 crore but there were over 8.15 crore
ration-card holders.
* Since the Left Front came to power in 1977,
over 50,000 people have died in poll-related violence.
* In over 1,000 polling booths, the CPI(M)
got more than 90 per cent of the votes polled.
* In the 2001 polls, in one booth in Hooghly,
the CPI(M) outvoted the Trinamool 1000:1. .
* In cities, polling has been as low as 30
per cent while in remote areas it has recorded 85 per cent.
* The state food minister admits that in 2005
alone his ministry had seized 19 lakh bogus ration cards.
