Captured on Camera

In the 1980s and 90s, booth capturing in Bihar was a threat to democratic functioning. Men with their faces covered and holding guns told people their votes had been cast. Now, voters in Bihar feel the Special Intensive Revision is another way to disenfranchise them

- Nalini Singh IS A SENIOR JOURNALIST, PRODUCER AND ANCHOR OF THE TV NEWS PROGRAMME, ANKHON DEKHI, SEVERAL ELECTION- RELATED PROGRAMMES, FEATURE PROGRAMMES, PROMOTER OF A NEPALI LANGUAGE TV CHANNEL, AND OCCASIONAL COLUMNIST

ON the morning of November 22, 1989, just as the flight to Patna was being called at Palam airport, I rushed to the crankish coin payphone and dialled the office of Shiv Sharma, Director General, Doordarshan with no hope that his PA would put me through to the mighty DG of the only TV channel in the country, as I was a mere independent journalist. But he came on the line, “What are you going to Bihar for? We have enough stringers and don’t really need any more coverage,” but he did not disconnect when I gushed that I was going to shoot booths being captured in Bihar in the ongoing general elections. “That’s outlandish, sounds impossible... but call me when you return”.

This was bureaucratese for “maybe”, and, elated with just this remote possibility that if I made a TV programme with shots of actual booth capturing, the DG might consider it for telecast, I walked on air. I had witnessed industrial-scale booth capturing and the alarming subversion of democracy in the 1980 general elections, and had allowed a slow burn in my mind to turn into a fixation to expose this erosion of democracy to the country (please refer to my article in the Economic and Political Weekly, May 1980, entitled, Elections As They Really Are). The practice of booth capturing was spreading fast, and only TV would jolt the country to this shocking truth, I was convinced. But how? I had hired a High Band camera (weight 18 kg), and a separate Nagra unit for sound recording (5 kg), and coaxed and cajoled a cameraman and sound recordist to accompany me (both were moonlighting from DD). To put it in context, in these times of palm-sized smart phones and meta smart camera glasses, our ‘investigative’ team was as inconspicuous as a camel caravan.