“We, the citizens of India, having abiding faith in democracy, hereby pledge to uphold the democratic traditions of our country and the dignity of free, fair and peaceful elections and to vote in every election fearlessly and without being influenced by considerations of religion, race, caste community, language or any inducement. – Pledge of the SVEEP campaign initiated by the Election Commission of India (ECI)
The Systematic Voter’s Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) is a programme to spread awareness and inform people on the importance of participating in the political process of the country. Though voting is a right and a duty but again voluntary too, the SVEEP campaign aims to educate the voters that voting actually decides the fate of the voters and not of the candidates. After 60 years of Independence, India finally debated in the parliament to stop criminalisation of politics and bills were enacted to check and reduce the same. However the rising cynicism among the large population of the youth in India increased resulting in low turnouts in successive elections, some recording less than 50% turnout. The ECI initiated the SVEEP campaign starting with the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010. Since then there has been an increase of voter turnout in almost all the elections conducted since 2010.
The scenario in Nagaland is completely different from the rest of India. It is not the low voter turnout that is plaguing the state. In the 2013 Assembly Elections the state recorded a massive 90.19% polling percentage!! Looking at this figure one would conclude SVEEP is not meant for Nagaland and that it’s a waste of resources and the taxpayer’s money.
A little in-depth scrutiny indicates that such high polling percentage is no doubt possible since Nagaland is lowly populated with just 12 Lakhs voters in 60 Assembly Constituencies averaging to just twenty thousand voters per constituency. It is agreed that the question of proxy voting persists and is still unanswered. However the bigger problem is the Naga method of “head of family, clan, village” voting for their respective groups which is reportedly practised in many of the rural areas. A workaround between the Naga traditional customs and the “alien” concept of voting through secret ballot. The Village Council is still the highest statutory body in the village and protected by the constitution of India. Can this conundrum be addressed by the SVEEP campaigns?
Nagaland also is a classic example of over-representation in one sense with too many entities in the form of villages, small towns, and other urban areas divided on Naga communal lines with very less population. If the contest is between clans, regions and prominent villages in the single tribe inhabited districts then in the multi tribe inhabited districts the contest is mainly between the tribes. For the voters of Nagaland, the SVEEP campaign pledge should touch on issues of clans, villages, regions, languages and tribes if it has to truly succeed in Nagaland. Voting based on religion is not a factor at present in Nagaland that has seen 7 BJP MLAs being voted to the Assembly way back in 2003 when all over India it was touted as a communal party.
Notwithstanding the unique local problems faced in Nagaland, the pledge to vote undertaken by the electorates will surely decrease the proxy voting to a large extent. However just as the ECI and its subsidiary agencies in the state conduct awareness programmes and persuades voters to take the pledge, in the same way the ECI has to formulate proper mechanism in the state to protect the pledge-takers to enable them to realise their pledges into practice during the time of elections. It will ensure that the pledge-takers do not form a new breed of people antagonistic to the electoral process.
