New Delhi, Oct 5: The massive electoral exercise in India might be over. But the equally exacting process of counting of votes will commence on October 6. Though there were about 800,000 voting stations around the country, there will only be 1,350 counting centres where ballot boxes from surrounding areas have been collected and stored in sealed strong rooms. Agents of candidates are known to keep round-the-clock vigil outside these rooms to see that ballot boxes are not tampered with.The parliamentary elections in India were held in five phases, beginning on September 5, and ended on October 3.
Each counting centre will have agents of political parties apart from scores of counting officers watching over the process. Agents check the veracity of each and every ballot and argue over whether a particular ballot is invalid or not. A ballot paper becomes invalid if the stamp overlaps into the next column or if more than one symbol is stamped.
The valid ballot papers of each candidate are then made into bundles of 25 each before counting starts.
The process is tedious and it sometimes takes over 24 hours to count about 500,000 to 700,000 votes in each parliamentary constituency, according to Election Commission officials.
The way in which the ballots are counted is considered so important that two candidates in Kerala petitioned the courts and secured an order which said that ballot papers should not be mixed before counting. Election Commission codes state that ballot papers from various stations in a constituency be mixed before sorting to prevent agents from identifying voting patterns in a particular neighbourhood.
The Kerala court, however, said that such mixing of ballot papers can be done only under "exceptional circumstances". In any case, with the electronic voting machines coming into vogue, agents can work out voting patterns since the machines are numbered according to which polling station they come from. Electronic machines were used in 46 constituencies out of the 538 in which elections were held.
The results in constituencies where the machines were used, like the seven in the capital New Delhi, will be out by 2.00 p.m., Election Commission officials said. For the two days that the counting will go on, millions of people will be tuned to the radio and, of course, television channels, all of which have launched an advertisement blitz to capture as many viewers as possible. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Star News channel, which is involved in a viewership war in the subcontinent with Zee TV and the state-run Doordarshan, will be covering the election results live for 100 hours.
The BBC and CNN too will have live election shows on October 6 and 7. CNN, which is trying to cash in on the new-found international interest in Indian politics, will also feature a live call-in with its star anchor Riz Khan. Websites of media organisations will also have frequent updates of election results, making this one of the most widely covered elections in India's history.
For the person going about his daily chores too there is a way to keep track of election results. If not peeping into television sets in stores, he can stop at the huge election scoreboards put up outside the offices of media organisations across the country.
A visitor uninitiated to the ways of Indian elections will wonder whether it is festival time with groups of people gathered in street corners discussing the trends and occasionally breaking into cheers and bursting firecrackers. It is indeed the great democratic festival where destinies are entwined with votes.
India Abroad News Service
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.