A take on how Jaagte Raho! campaign fared at the Bangalore municipal elections that were held on 28th March 2010, and where do we go from here.
The recently concluded BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike) election was the first major milestone for Janaagraha’s Jaagte Raho! campaign in Bangalore. Launched barely 4 months ago on 15th December 2009, the campaign is an attempt to redefine patterns of electoral engagement in urban India over the long term along two key dimensions – improved accuracy of electoral rolls, and high voter turnout.
Admittedly, there were no big victories at the city level this time around, and the turnout (at 44.1%) was similar to that during the last few elections in Bangalore. While the tendency to dismiss effectiveness of civil society campaigns at such occasions runs high, a finer analysis reveals that the issue of urban voter turnout is a complex one and it would be foolhardy to expect anything drastically different unless a few underpinning factors change. These can be broadly classified into factors External and Internal to civil society campaigns such as Jaagte Raho!
External Factors
There are two big external factors which affected the official voter turnout in the BBMP elections perhaps the most:
1. High error rates in electoral rolls – Bangalore’s electoral rolls have been long known to be highly inaccurate, with error rates (omissions and commissions) upto 40%! The issue has been further exacerbated in the last year when the State Election Commission (SEC) took over the charge of updating electoral rolls. While over 3 lakh voters were newly added, only 2500 deletions were made. The result is that Bangalore’s electoral rolls have become highly bloated, with 7 million official voters as against an expected 5.6 million voters going by the 2001 census. If one goes by the latter figure of actual voters, the actual voter turnout in Bangalore could be as high as 55%!
Going forward, this is easily the single most important issue for Election Commission of India to tackle if the perception on urban electoral engagement is to change. The good news here is that Chennai has already shown the way! During the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Chennai was the only metro to register a turnout of 60% - a clear 13% rise from the turnout in previous general election. The key reason attributed by the ECI itself was intensive cleaning up of electoral rolls and deletion of names of bogus voters. In Chennai, the ECI carries out an intensive process of electoral roll updation every year through door-to-door enumeration, while Bangalore and most other cities do it once every 5 years.
2. Poor connect between candidates and voters – Besides the call to duty, one of the most effective motivations to vote is to know that one is voting for a good candidate. For this to happen, adequate information on all candidates needs to be made available much in advance of Election Day. This is a long standing issue afflicting our electoral setup, which worsened further in the case of BBMP elections. With the entire election cycle crunched to 3 weeks, perhaps the shortest cycle ever, there was little time left for most voters to familiarize themselves with their candidates, and vice-versa. As a result, many voters found it difficult to shun their general cynicism towards the entire political setup and eventually opted out of voting. The fact that most voters voted on party lines, the ruling party won and independent candidates fared poorly can also be attributed to the same factor to an extent.
Going forward, Jaagte Raho! campaign will continue its dialogue with ECI and create a more favourable eco-system for the ECI to bring about a much needed overhaul of urban electoral systems.
Internal Factors
Despite the large role that external factors can play, there is lot that a campaign such as Jaagte Raho! can do in affecting the trend of voter turnout. Following are the two key reasons why the efforts of Jaagte Raho! had a limited impact in these elections:
1. Launched barely 4 months back, the campaign is still at a very nascent stage of its evolution with only 5% of its targeted grassroots volunteer base (Area Voter Mitras) set up. Building a strong city-wide grassroots network of committed volunteers takes time, as does any genuine attempt at social change. The campaign expects to go through this journey in next few years, as it stays committed on its mission of improving electoral engagement in urban India.
2. Many of the campaign strategies at a micro-level are still experimental in nature, and are bound to get better and more nuanced in their approach with subsequent elections. To add to this, Jaagte Raho! is planning to carry out some core research studies that will provide crucial insights into the reasons that inhibit or encourage electoral engagement in urban India. This will play an important role in guiding campaign’s response in the future
That being said, there were some important positive takeaways for the campaign from this experience viz.
- The effectiveness of Area Voter Mitra (AVM) model has been validated on a pilot scale, with a few AVMs successfully registering hundreds of new voters in their polling booths at one go, and affecting upto 10% increase in voter turnout. The challenge now is to scale this up to a city level.
- Spreading information on ALL candidates is an effort intensive though an essential task before every election. Taking the approach of enabling volunteers to organize ward level Know Your Candidate (KYC) events, the campaign succeeded in enabling AVMs to organize as many as 10 KYC events – the highest for any election in Bangalore so far.
- Several colleges in Bangalore ran voter awareness drives prior to Election Day, through their Jaagte Raho! clubs. In addition, Jaagte Raho! clubs in colleges and companies mobilized close to 80 volunteers for door-to-door drives across the city proving their effectiveness as important channels to get the youth involved in reinvigorating our democracy.
This experience has been crucial for Jaagte Raho! to get a finer understanding of the complexities affecting urban electoral engagement, and to draw up a more nuanced long term strategy for Bangalore and other cities that the campaign will foray into. A change, though unlikely in the immediate horizon, is definitely achievable with persistent focus and action.
