EVMs and Democracy

I have refrained from indulging in pissing contests on whether Indian democracy is better than other time tested ones in the Western world. To me it is much like five year olds comparing whether my willie is longer than yours. I lived long enough in our flawed democracy to be modest about it and realize that these are early years yet. Fifty years in a nation’s history is like a year in human life and we need to evolve further as a nation. There is a chain mail going around giving a breakup of the criminals among our elected parliamentarians. I always maintained that there is nothing much to feel proud about our democracy and constantly take potshots at it. But scratch the surface and you will find every Indian proud of our democracy. Sitting in Canberra, I miss all the gossip in South Block. How the political and bureaucratic winds are blowing, who is close to whom and what is going on, etc. I speak to my ex-colleagues once in a while. They are all dreading the possibility that the winners in this elections might bring in a new generation of political mercenaries to power.
Talk to any successful 30 something Indian investment banker rolling in money- he will tell you that India ought to have Chinese style one party rule, military rule or benevolent dictatorship. Conveniently forgetting that if absence of democracy was the best way to growth, may be Nigeria, Pakistan, N.Korea & Burma ought to have been up there in the comity of developed countries by now.
But it sent goose pimples all over me yesterday to hear a white man say that even the US ought to learn from Indians how to conduct elections. An Australian Election Official shared the table with me at the lunch at press club for a talk on Indian Elections organized by the Indian High Commission. Between flutes of wine and grilled fish, he was comparing Indian elections with various systems and said that the Indian system is a wonder. He seemed to know everything about the indelible ink, the electronic voting machine and all the other features that make Indian elections a unique exercise.
In a country of India’s diversity and magnitude, to have a democracy and to conduct elections periodically itself might be called an act of heroism, said Robin Jeffrey, the resident Indophile and the main speaker. He gave examples and data to prove his point. The entire electorates of Australia, East & South East Asia are not as large as the Indian electorate of 714 million voters, he said. Then he went on and on about the diversity of the country which is even more than what one can hope to see as one travels from Spain through Finland. Then he went on to describe the Electronic Voting Machine as one of the main heroes of the elections.
A thrill ran through me as I heard it. The Defence Public sector company (Bharat Electronics Ltd) that I have been intimately associated with, in the Ministry of Defence in Delhi designed the machine a quarter century ago. It was first used in a constituency in Kerala. I recall politicians holding press conferences in those days to show how the machine is susceptible to manipulation and can be misused by the ruling party. Whenever I speak to the technocrats in BEL about it, they talk of it as the past. Yeah…that is an order we fulfilled with ECIL, another public sector company. There is very little future requirement and hence we have to move on to other things. They were a bunch of faceless Engineers who did a great job and moved on - without a sense of history for this marvelous achievement. One of the EVM team designers of those days, I have heard, was a Tamil writer, an IIT educated Engineer who goes by the pen name Sujata in Tamil periodicals.
Twenty years on we conducted an election entirely on the EVM (2004 elections). The entire world has started to sit up and take notice. The elections in 2000 when the US could not throw up a clear winner due to omissions in counting made the US system look bumbling compared to the Indian one. Even criminal-candidates in India accept EVMs as reality and are constantly looking for ways to beat the system- instead of stuffing ballots in the old fashioned way, they keep the queues engaged, which makes it a very labour intensive and impractical way to distort the system, says Jeffrey. So, practically it offers very little scope for old fashioned rigging. The technology is not too high fangled and networked to enable a geek to hack into the system. Nor is it too sophisticated and delicate that it cannot withstand the dust and heat of the Indian countryside. It is just enough technology and a lot of capability built into it.
India had universal adult franchise before the Americans had it. The EVM is one such thing which merits a mention along with the architects of the first Indian General elections- They visualized the need for universal adult franchise to empower every Indian, election symbols, to enable recognition of candidates by a poor illiterate population and indelible ink, to prevent multiple voting. The people behind the EVM, I hope, shall be remembered when histories of elections are wrote.