Srinagar, India. 12th May, 2024: Polling officers carrying Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines destined for polling stations. [photo: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy]
[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.]
Elections may be the means to an end but no one could claim that this year’s mammoth exercise dragged India from a lowly 66th place in the World Bank Government Efficiency Index to the top of the list.
The Zhou cited their Mandate of exclusivity to justify overthrowing the previously ruling Shang dynasty at the Battle of Muye in 1046 BCE. Mr Modi struck a similar note by dismissing the Congress party, the party of India’s independence, as a ‘parasite’, and its leader, Rahul Gandhi, as anti-Hindu. Not everyone agreed. Indeed, the octogenarian Congress party president, Mallikarjun Kharge, clearly disputed the sublime conviction that like the Zhou, the BJP, too, was born to rule, when he called the election outcome a ‘moral and political loss’ for Mr Modi and a ‘win for democracy’ and the public. For the Prime Minister, however, his return to office for a third time was ‘a historical feat’ that marked a place ‘in India’s history’.Footnote35
Discontents
Ignored by him, other discontents are spreading.Footnote36 Fourteen political parties have moved the Supreme Court against the indiscriminate use of central agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate against Opposition leaders.Footnote37 The Wire, which calls itself ‘India’s foremost independent news-site, carrying critical opinion, investigations and reportage’ mentions CBI probes against 118 opposition leaders since Mr Modi assumed office and cites this as ‘evidence of abuse’.Footnote38 Other instances cited include the expulsion of a firebrand opposition legislator Mahua Moitra, who is known for asking pointed questions in parliament, over an allegation of misconduct; the arrest on corruption charges of two state chief ministers; and the cancellation of Rahul Gandhi’s parliamentary membership after a local court in Mr Modi’s home state of Gujarat convicted him in a defamation case. Gandhi could not return to parliament until August, when the highest court in the land overturned the conviction.Footnote39
Signifying the unrest underlying glowing official reports of miraculous growth and an economic boom is a poster released by the BJP government of Chhattisgarh state on 12 June proudly broadcasting, ‘In the last six months, 129 Maoists killed’. According to the respected independent website Scroll.in, the death count went up not long afterwards to 138.Footnote40 Across the political divide, the Trinamul Congress ruled West Bengal, where the BJP has virtually no presence, is in a ferment over a sensational case of alleged rape and murder of a young female doctor.
None of this disrupted the smooth management of India’s gigantic polls. Given India’s population growth, the number of voters had spiralled by 150 million since the 2019 election to touch 969 million. Wooed by 8,360 candidates representing 744 parties, they were served by some 15 million election workers and 5.5 million electronic voting machines in 1,035,918 polling stations. Recruited from various government offices, the army of workers trudged through deep snow in Ladakh’s Hamboting La pass, braved turbulent rivers in boats and fought their way through dense jungles. ‘Employees from the private sector were deliberately kept out of election duties as no administrative control could be exercised over them once the elections were over’ wrote a former Chief Election Commissioner, S.Y. Quraishi, in his book, An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election. Only government staff were deployed because ‘they would be subject to the control and discipline of the government at all times’.Footnote41
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Since the law decrees that no adult Indian should be denied the opportunity of exercising his or her franchise, there were EVMs for even a single voter in remote locations like an Arunachal Pradesh village on the Chinese frontier, the Gir Forest lion reserve where the solitary priest in a Hindu temple could not be denied his constitutional right, and a shipping container on an island off the Gujarat coast. Polling booths were set up in a wildlife sanctuary in Kerala and in 320 relief camps for nearly 59,000 people displaced during the inter-tribal rioting in Manipur state on the Myanmar border. Not all complaints were eliminated even then. The courts rejected a petition to abandon EVMs and return to the old system of ballot slips although the petitioners claimed EVMs were not foolproof since a candidate in Belgium’s 2003 elections when an early version of the machine was used received more votes than there were eligible voters.
With a single vote estimated to cost Rs 1,400 ($16.74) the contesting parties are believed to have spent Rs 100,000 crores, or approximately $11,930 million, marking a significant jump from the Rs 55,000 crores or so (approximately $6,561 million) reportedly spent in India’s last general elections five years ago. The total estimated expenditure for the 2024 elections is expected to reach a staggering $1,618,042 million (Rs 1.35 lakh crores), surpassing the $1,200,000 (Rs 1.2 lakh crores) reportedly spent in the 2020 US elections.Footnote42
In contrast with the legal cap on spending by individual candidates, there is no ceiling on how much a sponsoring party can lavish on its nominees. In any case, considerable election expenditure is believed to remain unaccounted for although the EC appoints expenditure observers and demands timely audited reports. But the role of under-the-table giveaways, including gifts, cash, and gold, allegedly continues to rise. According to N. Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the Centre for Media Studies, a major portion of election expenses is allocated to social media campaigning.Footnote43 Supporting that claim, Simon Chauchard, a Columbia University academic, was quoted as saying, ‘Indian politicians feel you’ve got to do new things, and crazier things, and bigger things and louder things. It’s a bunch of panicky candidates throwing money around to voters but also to vendors selling all kinds of stuff useful in a political campaign.’Footnote44
One way of ‘throwing’ money around that Mr Modi made possible was through the electoral bonds that he introduced in 2017 and which the Supreme Court struck down on 15 February 2024, arguing that ‘This scenario fosters crony capitalism, a threat to India’s democracy’.Footnote45 One instance cited was that of the Keventers Group, a dairy and fresh food company that donated nearly 100 times its annual profit in 2019–2020 to politicians, greatly reducing its tax payments.Footnote46 The EC called the scheme regressive, lamenting its adverse implications for transparency. While the BJP raked in about $788 million from electoral bonds, the most prominent opposition party, Mr Gandhi’s Congress, secured only $134 million, the asymmetry intensifying calls for a revaluation of the scheme’s efficacy and ethical implications.
No wonder Mrs Sitharaman’s Budget has been called ‘a Hindutva gift to corporates, while it designs systems that put students, farmers, and entrepreneurs into debt traps created by banks, furthering the interests of an unproductive, rent-seeking economy’.Footnote47 Among others who poured derision on the Budget’s claim of transforming the economy and turning India into a global manufacturing hub as ‘too audacious’ was the Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy. ‘India is far away from becoming a hub – these are just big words that are used’ he claimed during a tech summit in Bengaluru. As for China, Murthy says that ‘China has six times India’s GDP. We were about the same in the mid-70s’. He also praised the Chinese, saying that the Chinese are disciplined, they have national pride, they work hard, and they don’t argue like Indians do.Footnote48
The Chinese don’t party like Indians either as the much-anticipated wedding of the year, reputed to cost some $600 million proved.Footnote49 His fortune assessed by Forbes at about $116 billion, Mukesh Ambani, the groom’s father, is reckoned Asia’s richest man. The bride’s multi-billionaire family, the Merchants, own Encore Healthcare. Global celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, Ivanka Trump, Bill Gates and Karlie Kloss attended the pre-wedding bash in Jamnagar, scene of the Ambanis’ ancestral home and animal sanctuary and mango orchard in a 750-acre compound. There was a four-day cruise in the Mediterranean; singers like Rihanna and Justin Bieber being flown in to perform.
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a Freelance Journalist and a Member, International Advisory Board, The Round Table, Calcutta, India.
