Election Managers and Party Workers: In Common and Collaborative Pursuit

Over the past few weeks, representatives of political parties sat down with field-level election managers, across assembly constituencies, districts, and states for resolving their issues and grievances.

- AKSHAY ROUT

About five thousand meetings have been held with over 28,000 representatives of political parties joining in. More than four thousand Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), about eight hundred District Election Officers (DEOs), and Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) of all 28 states and 8 Union Territories took up this countrywide exercise.

Expectation is that only a few sticky matters which were beyond the decentralized framework will come to the table of the three-member apex body of the Election Commission in Delhi.

Simultaneously, the Election Commission (EC) has taken up a centralized sensitization program for one lakh Booth Level Officers (BLOs) who will train another ten lakh BLOs. For ECI, there is a rare window of a few poll-free months when some thoughtful capacity building can be done. Obviously, the priority attention is for states like Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, and Tamil Nadu where elections are near the horizon.

While the shine of Indian elections is often attributed to constitutional imagination and the democratic passion of Indian voters, one understated strength is the elaborate arrangement of working and walking together of political functionaries and grassroots election managers in the hinterland. Calling this transparency in election management may still fall short of the full dimensions of virtue.