Poll positions

EC should have held UP polls in April

The Election Commission (EC) has laid to rest a nascent controversy over delayed state elections by setting out the timetable for the five states whose Assembly terms are coming to an end. The risks of holding this exercise are extremely high, of course, with the extra-infectious Omicron variant of Covid-19 coursing through the country, adding over 100,000 to the daily caseload from a low of 5,300-odd at the end of December. In that sense, the EC has been sensible in banning campaigns till January 15, and keeping the decision open to the circumstances. This should, at the very least, minimise the large, crowded rallies of mostly mask-less voters that parties across the ideological divide appear to have no compunction in mobilising. Given the rank indiscipline of all parties in observing the basics of Covid-19 safety protocols, it may be a good idea for the EC to extend the ban beyond January 15.

The Covid-19 numbers after the April 2021 Assembly elections in five states saw a surge with the count of daily cases peaking at more than 400,000 in early May. Equally, the decision to treat election officials as frontline workers eligible for booster shots is also sensible. In the last set of Assembly elections, the EC had taken practical steps to improve the security apparatus. Instead of relying on state and district authorities to draw up plans, the EC has introduced a “committee model” involving the chief electoral officer in each state, the Central Armed Police Forces, and a state police nodal officer to work out the security plan — this structure will be replicated at the district-level as well. This security decision-making structure was made applicable from April 2021 onwards.
 

Against these pragmatic moves must be weighed the EC’s decision to allow an extended time-table of nearly a month for the polls. Indeed, it is an open question whether the elections could have been held in the last week of February when the impact of Omicron is expected to have abated. Doing this would not have been a problem since the Assembly sessions of four of the five poll-bound states — Goa, Manipur, Punjab, and Uttarakhand — end between March 15 and 19. All but Manipur, because of its hilly terrain, have single-phase polls on February 14 but will have to wait till March 10 for the results (Manipur will have two-phase elections on February 27 and March 3).

The February 10-March 7 polling schedule has been drawn up principally to accommodate seven phases in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state with 403 seats. UP has held seven-phase elections since at least the 2012 polls, a response to extra security required in this large state. But the EC could well have leveraged technologies that are now available to it — electronic voting machines, digital cameras, and so on have largely put an end to the traditional crime of booth capturing — to crunch the timeline and hold elections later, given that the state’s Assembly term ends on May 14. Long-drawn elections are undesirable because the TV and digital media enable parties to stay permanently in campaign mode long after campaigning stops in one phase. To ensure that its own rules are followed in letter and spirit, the EC should focus on shorter elections as a matter of principle.