We could learn a lot from India after that shambles of an General Election
Some readers of this blog, probably most of its Indian readers, think me too negative about India (fair), and that this betrays a colonial superiority (couldn’t be more wrong). It is easy to see the chaos in India and profess bafflement at why it doesn’t take obvious measures to impose order. The observations do carry the implicit assertion that we do things better in Britain.
But watching the television coverage of last week’s general election, the assertion was exposed as a lie, or at best a former truth. Vir Sanghvi, one of India’s shrewdest commentators said as much in his Counterpoint column in the Hindustan Times yesterday.
The lie was broadcast on the big-screen at the British High Commission’s election breakfast party where correspondents, Foreign Office staff and leading Indian politicians gathered to watch the "mother-country’s" democracy in action.
As senior Congress politicians watched in amusement, weather-beaten, frustrated British voters voiced their outrage at being kept waiting for hours before finally being denied their vote by hapless officials. Between clips comparing our economy to that of Greece, speculating about savage austerity budgets, and officials unable to provide ballot papers for 30 million people, I felt a strong and humiliating sense of looking back on my dark, dreich land from a place of unbridled optimism in the sun.
Last year, Indian officials oversaw the smooth counting of 417 million votes in temperatures of 45 degrees, under threat of violence and in some places in the crossfire of running gun battles between rival political gangs.
Officials in extremely harsh conditions staged the greatest democratic event in human history, while in Britain their counterparts complained they hadn’t expected such a large turn-out – just 29.5 million. In an election where every vote had the potential to make the difference between government and opposition, it’s a source of national shame that election officials couldn’t handle a tiny electorate casting its four-yearly vote.
Our officials should be sent to road-less, rural Bihar in time for its state elections later this year to see how their Indian counterparts manage without a fraction of their resources and comforts. It would be a small price to pay for this year’s disgrace. As punishment, it should be filmed as a reality show.
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