Delhi has been through two rounds of elections in the past six months and registered impressive voter turnouts on both occasions. The 2013 Assembly elections held in December registered a 65.86 per cent voter turnout, up from 57.8 per cent in 2008. The April 10 Lok Sabha polls saw a voter turnout of 65.09 per cent, a 13 per cent jump from the previous parliamentary election held in 2009.
With fresh elections for the 70-member Assembly a possibility in the Capital, The Hindu spoke to Chief Electoral Officer Vijay Dev on Thursday to find out how he pulled off two incident-free polls and how he plans to handle the third.
Do you think Delhi is an easy city to hold elections in?
I would say the opposite. Having worked in Goa, Arunachal Pradesh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, the level of scrutiny is highest in Delhi. Here, you have the national media, the highest judicial authorities, the Election Commission of India and every other agency that keeps a close watch on you. Every decision and law and order issues revolves around us and we will have to shoulder the responsibility. Besides, I feel that we lay benchmarks for other States and other countries to follow.
How did you clean up the electoral rolls and ensure such a high voter turnout?
Delhi has traditionally been afflicted with the malady of urban apathy, which explains the low turnouts in previous years. So, when I took over in 2012, I set out to find where the gaps were. An important issue has also been the fullness and the health of the electoral rolls. We found that the rolls were inflated because of bogus voters and deflated in some categories pertaining to women and youth.
The electoral roll is termed healthy if we have a good `elector to population ratio’. We found that the ratio was higher than normal so we embarked on a door-to-door survey between 2012 till the Assembly elections last year. We deleted 15 lakh names off the electoral rolls.
We also made sure we will go to polls with 100 per cent photo electoral rolls (PER) which is making sure that each elector’s photograph is on our database. When I started this exercise, we had 84 per cent PER, which was lower than States such as Bihar and Odisha, which had close to 96 per cent. This is an area which is prone to misuse so we needed to fix it.
The electoral rolls were also seriously deflated when it came to women and young voters. Young voters made up only 0.8 per cent when it should have been as much as 3 per cent so we started a massive drive that meant nearly 3 lakh voters (up from 90,000) voted in these elections. Similarly, we identified the areas where the gender ratio was lower and held special enrolment drives there.
How did you manage to turnthese elections into a “festival”?
We went with targeted interventions. Making them appropriate for the kind of voters we were focussing on. For instance, just as much as we organised Haryanvi cultural programmes in border areas, we organised rock shows for the youth in South Delhi. An event at one place will not sufficient to cover the whole city, so we held different programmes in different districts.
The funds for this came under the ‘Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation’ which had been utilised in a non-targeted manner so long. The funds were used for printing pamphlets that nobody used to read and there used to be rooms filled with those.
Any inclination on when elections can be held, if at all?
As on date, I will say I don’t even know if Delhi is going to go in for elections. The government will first take a call on that and if they decide that the Assembly is to be dissolved and fresh elections are to be held they will make a representative to the Election Commission. Suffice to say that because we are going to have elections to some Assemblies in Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and Maharashtra, it is logical to assume that if there are to be elections in Delhi it may coincide with these elections that are to take place.
