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| Guns fall silent in UP for first time | | | BL KAK
NEW DELHI, Apr 25:
"We have done well in four exams and there are three more papers to go". These words have come from the Chief Election Commissioner, N Gopalaswami. Four phases of the Assembly polls are over. The polls have been, for the first time, been almost violence-free.
The guns have fallen silent and not a single instance of violence has been reported from the four phases of polling so far. i is generally felt that the phenomenon has been due to 18 months of planning done by the Election Commission to micro manage each of the 403 constituencies. For the first time in India’s electoral history the concept of vulnerability mapping was introduced.
A village was taken as a unit and the vulnerable section and the threat perception identified. The threat, which in many cases was the local goon or muscleman was then put under surveillance. A point of contact within the vulnerable community was identified and cultivated as an informant who would relay information to the Election Commission officials.
And the Chief Election Commissioner said: “If the booth official saw that none of the people on a electoral roll had come to vote then observers would be sent to escort the community to the polling station". Another loophole which political party workers have been tempted to misutilise has been the missing voters or ghost voters. Over two million dead voters have been removed from the list and eight million missing voters, who have migrated to other States, have been identified and their names are now on the surveillance list.
According to Goipalaswami, in some constituencies the percentage of the so-called missing voters is as high as 20 per cent and often that is the percentage difference between victory and defeat.
There have been many firsts for the Election Commission in the UP election, from the use of the special software for a micro-analysis of the State's previous electoral records to extensive use of CCTV cameras and videographers. All this keeping in mind what author Ruskin Bond once said that Uttar Pradesh is a world in itself.
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