AA Edit | EC’s final task is to ensure fairness of vote counting

The great Indian general elections ended on June 1 after 64.2 crore people out of an eligible 97 crore cast their votes. Among them there were 31.2 crore women, making them the biggest ever number of voters since female suffrage was introduced in 1892 in New Zealand. The biggest credit goes to the little over 64 crore people who braved the elements to exercise their franchise, a majority of whom having voted in the sweltering heat of a particularly severe Indian summer.

Minor glitches like EVM malfunction, power failure and sporadic incidence of violence were overcome. Whatever be the hitches, there was no reason to doubt the Indian polls are the freest elections in the world with not one eligible voter whose name is on the rolls pressured not to vote.

It is moot whether the polls were the fairest because the losers habitually cast aspersions on the Indian voting system despite its robust methodology and its strong voting and counting process governed by the standalone EVMs that are thought to be beyond manipulation.

Given the kind of charges that the combined opposition came up with, including a conspiracy theory surrounding the home minister calling up District magistrates and Collectors to pressure them, the EC held an unprecedented media conference to explain the election process and the challenges posed as well as to answer criticism.

The EC did well to explicitly state that the postal ballots will be counted first and the EVM votes 30 minutes later. But then the system has always followed that pattern, did so in 2019 and 2021 and in the counting of the Assembly poll votes of Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim and why the opposition was apprehensive about this has not been explained.

The Indian voting system has come far since the days of booth capturing, rigging and violence aimed at stopping voters from exercising their franchise. The EVMs, now backed by VVPATs and partial matching of its count with those of the EVMS, have proved reliable workhorses of the Indian voting system.

It is up to some parties to explain why they say the system is perfect when they win and why it is abominably prejudiced when they lose. And to think that the most flagrant violation of the poll process came when a candidate who was leading asked for a recount and managed to lose the seat to a very prominent opposition leader. Where the EC may not have lived up to its reputation was in the exercise of its powers to pull up a candidate, including the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and other party bigwigs who either breached the norms in using religion as a talking point thus bringing in social divisiveness as the Prime Minister did or went overboard in castigating the PM with vituperative invective, including one legislator who did so in unacceptable Tamil slang.

There were questions raised about the difference between the real time voter turnout data and the final figures released by ECI which may not have been answered satisfactorily in the assertion that everything was fine. Now that the longest and biggest ever poll has come to an end, the focus shifts to the counting process that must be fair to satisfy the most basic premise of a democracy.