All reports and TV camera footage confirm that Wednesday’s voting in six lok Sabha seats of West Bengal have been wantonly rigged by the State’s ruling party. The story sounds exactly the same as I experienced last Wednesday.
On the evening of April 30, soon after returning to my home in Hooghly town following a survey of booths in my constituency, I bitterly told a TV news channel: “This was an election of the Trinamool, by the Trinamool, for the Trinamool.” This assessment was based on what I saw and heard on polling day in different parts of my lok Sabha seat of Hooghly.
Particularly in Dhaniakhali (once famous for its unique cotton saris), one of the seven Assembly segments of the lok Sabha constituency, there was no election at all! I randomly visited eight polling booths in the sprawling Assembly segment to find not a single polling agent of any party other than the Trinamool Congress.
In some booths, there was a second agent, but invariably he ostensibly represented some nondescript Independent candidate, sitting cozily with the ruling party’s representative. In booth No 105 I jocularly asked the “Independent” agent, if he was Trinamool’s No 2! Grinning sheepishly, he concurred with an eye fixed firmly on his big brother, terrified whether he had committed a faux pas.
In every booth I visited, I looked around for the presence of Central paramilitary forces. I found none. Only two jawans of the West Bengal Armed Police, antiquated rifles lazily slung on their shoulders, could be spotted idling under the shadow of trees with a couple of emaciated Home Guards. They had obviously been tutored to proclaim that everything was peaceful, despite the fact that all the booths I visited had been looted by Trinamool goons in the first two hours of polling.
Take booth No 111 in Dhaniakhali for example. By 11 am, 604 voters out of the booth’s total of 961 had already exercised their franchise. With an inscrutable expression, the polling officer declared this to be normal. In fact he patted his back saying high voting showed the growing political awareness of people and was also a tribute to the Election Commission’s efficiency. The statistical impossibility of 150 votes (approx) being cast on an average every 60 minutes did not occur to the presiding officer and his colleagues!
No election observer was present in any of the booths I visited. Nor were they covered by video cameras. I chose the booths to be visited on the basis of complaints by BJP workers who, frankly, were too scared to sit inside the booths.
Admittedly, the BJP is not a powerful force in an organisational sense in Dhaniakhali. However, in one case (booth 105), one young BJP activist dared to register himself as a polling agent. He was driven out in two hours on pain of death. I told my party activists to locate him. Since his mobile was unreachable, some local workers bicycled to his home. His mother told them, he had come in briefly, packed a bag and fled saying he feared for his life for defying the ruling party’s diktat not to enter the booth.
Although no official would admit this, Trinamool’s modus operandi was clinical and successful. According to bystanders who spoke in whispers, they mobbed the booth at 7 am, as soon as voting started. Entering the booth in a pack, one of them moved into the EVM enclosure, while others directed the officials to issue slips at random. Trinamool activists lined up one by one to get their left forefinger inked while the man standing before the EVM pressed the button as names were called out. The names were genuine; the man casting the vote on their behalf wasn’t.
Their mission over in about two hours, Trinamool goons left after casting about 66 per cent of the total votes. Presumably, those left out were assumed to be Trinamool voters anyway. In many cases, Trinamool workers went from house to house the night before polling to tell voters firmly that they need not tire themselves out by trudging to the booth on a hot and sultry day. Their work would be happily done by Trinamool workers. Beware those who still insist on casting their vote themselves...
Incidentally, both the BJP and CPM had formally intimated the district authorities that Dhaniakhali was a sensitive segment and Central paramilitary forces ought to be stationed everywhere. I held a widely reported Press conference in Kolkata on April 12 to express our apprehensions of widespread distortion of the polling process by the Trinamool in that segment.
Nothing was done. So, it was the same story in all the booths visited. Officials invariably stonewalled queries on the unusually high voting in the first few hours and had no explanation for the voting rate per hour dropping to single digits thereafter. There was no explanation why even the CPI(M), which held Dhaniakhali in an iron grip till just over five years ago, had vanished as if into thin air, with not one polling agent in sight.
I returned home to Hooghly around 2 pm, dejected that my strenuous campaign spanning six weeks might go in vain. It is likely that, having stuffed a majority of Dhaniakhali’s 301 booths, Trinamool may notch up a lead of one lakh-plus, making it impossible for any other candidate to overcome this deficit from the remaining Assembly segments. Another rural segment, minority-dominated Polba (Saptagram) could also go the same way.
In Hooghly, there was no significant violence on polling day. They did not need to indulge in it. Quiet terror was all pervasive. In my last campaign visit to Dhaniakhali, I stopped by at a tea shop. The shop owner struck up a conversation and was rather complimentary towards the BJP.
But when asked if he would vote for me, his facial expression changed. Then he posed a pertinent query: “Suppose I vote for you. But what happens when ‘they’ come to my house next day and attack usIJ They are capable of killing because they know nothing will happen. Will any of your boys come to protect usIJ You don’t have enough boys to counter them anyway!”I had no answer. In rural Bengal, might is right. And the vote inevitably goes with the mighty. Just a bit of muscle flexing before polling day is enough to ensure that people don’t go to vote, leaving that “onerous” task to the ruling party’s musclemen.
It was exactly the same when CPI(M) was in power. I know innumerable cases when people entered the polling booth at five minutes past 7 am only to discover their votes had already been cast! Booths were simply taken over, those in the queue driven out after a few country-made bombs were hurled in their direction, and paper ballots of those years stamped at will and stuffed into boxes by party goons.Only when paramilitary forces were stationed all over and videography was introduced inside polling stations did the electorate muster the courage to overthrow the Communists in a revolution by the ballot. Sadly, the change was short-lived. It’s yesterday once more.
It is clear nothing has changed, except the colour of the ruling group. Red has given way to blue. Bengal had genuine polls only when the Central Election Commission not only talked tough, but acted tough too. But this time, it seems there is an inexplicable lack of nerve. EC was hyperactive when the campaign was on. Permissions for rallies and road shows were routinely denied. My campaign was videographed in entirety. But on the day it mattered, video cameras, impartial observers and paramilitary were all mysteriously missing.
Trinamool has left nothing to chance. The day before polling, they even mounted a campaign of calumny against me, making the absurd allegation that I was distributing money in broad daylight at the Chinsurah Railway Station. The idea was to throw enough mud through the media so that some of it stuck. luckily for me, the local media did not buy it although a national daily did. Having failed to put me off balance, they resorted to their last weapon - rigging. This was not confined to Hooghly, but spread to neighbouring constituencies too, in pursuit of the Trinamool supremo’s directive that all 42 seats from Bengal must be won, by hook or crook. Now that I am a victim of Bengal’s culture of booth rigging by the ruling party, I await the day when genuine voting will return to my State.
Sadly enough, my complaints to the Hooghly District Magistrate (Returning Officer) and subsequently, the Chief Election Commissioner VS Sampath, in person, have not yielded results yet. I was asked to produce footage! That incidentally, is the EC’s job. And, by the way, carrying cameras inside polling booths is an electoral offence. I requested them just to tally the rate of voting in Dhaniakhali with the rest of the constituency to establish my case. Even that hasn’t been done. Irrespective of who wins from Hooghly or other troubled seats of Bengal, it is clear that democracy has bypassed the people of the State one more time.