Bihar Elections amidst COVID-19 Crisis

Ishita Jain.

Bihar Legislative Assembly Elections are scheduled for October 2020 to elect 243 members of the Bihar Legislative Assembly. With political gatherings and rallies banned due to the Covid-19 crisis, there will be an increased push towards online campaigning. From the time when Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav shunned tech-savvy parties, politics in Bihar has come to a point that virtual rallies and online workers meetings have taken centre stage ahead of upcoming elections. After a virtual rally of Home Minister Amit Shah on June 7 with a claimed viewership of 1 crore, Chief Minister & JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar is to address the same kind of rally in July. JD (U) is aggressively creating Whatsapp and Facebook groups to reach out to first-time voters. While Congress organized communications of senior party functionaries with grassroots workers through interactive sessions. The Election Commission also wants to utilise the digital means to reach out to the voters.
Employing technology is a good idea, but when offline modes of campaigning are unavailable, the process becomes unfair to those who don’t have access to the internet. As per NITI Aayog, internet reach in Bihar was 28 per cent as of 2019. And a disproportionately large number of these users are men. In the pursuit of fairness, how about postponing the election by just six months? By March next year, the COVID crisis would have been better if not ended.

पटना में परीक्षण में तेजी जाने के लिए ICMR ने अत्याधुनिक मशीन लगायी
While inequity is not the only basis for postponing the elections, the other is the state’s absent health infrastructure: it ranks 20 out of 21 large states in the NITI Aayog’s ranking. The virus has spread to all 38 districts of Bihar, and cases have grown significantly since the return of migrant labourers. As inter-state travel restrictions have been raised, the government has decided to no longer test and quarantine returning labourers. Further, Bihar has the lowest testing rate and the positive case rate is 7-9%. When people are flouting social distancing even before election dates have been announced, imagine what would happen when they are. These elections could just cause the collapse of the state’s healthcare system.
Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar and senior BJP leader, Sushil Kumar Modi opined that the Election Commission of India should develop a digital polling method for Bihar polls as it would not be prudent to put the voters beyond the social distancing to go to polling booths to vote. He further stated that it is reasonable to conduct polling online and that an example can be taken from South Korea. However, the internet reach is insignificant in Bihar and there does exist a plethora of infrastructural differences between the two. It is a parody of democracy if an election is held without voters getting a chance to vote.

चीन-भारत सीमा हालात ‘बेहद गंभीर’, भारत और चीन की मदद के लिए अमेरिका कर रहा है उनसे बातचीत: ट्रंप
The Election Commission claimed that it might increase the number of booths to enable social distancing, and allow postal ballots for those above 60 years of age. The EC would cap the number of voters at every booth at 800 (from the current 1,400). These measures could completely re-imagine how polling is done in India, giving rise to a whole new set of controversies. And it may still result in spreading the virus. Bihar is a densely populated state and even 800 voters per booth will mean a lot of people mingling and unknowingly passing on the virus.
Axis – My India Head, pollster Pradeep Gupta located two main problems: one is of campaigning and the second is devising technology to ensure that proximity is not a factor in polling. With obsolete voter lists and lack of connection between Aadhar cards and mobile numbers, extensive technology will be needed to actualise online polling. Nonetheless, if the elections take place on time, it will be the precursor to just how a pandemic affects electoral democracy.