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 Election Commission
of India
lnstitutionalising Democratic
Uncertainties

Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Anupama Roy ·

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRE SS
 OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
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Published in India by
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© Oxford University Press 2019

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19·949425-5

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Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii

Acknowledgements lX
List ofAbbreviations xi

Introduction 1
1. The First General Elections: The Political
and the Bureaucratic 44
2. Electoral Roll, the 'Vote', and Democracy 126
3. 'Election Time' and the Model Code of Conduct 181
4. Creating Spaces for Democracy 259
Conclusion 327

Select Bibliography 348

Index 357
About the Authors 366
viii Figures and Tables

Tables

1.1 Women Voters as Percentage ofTotal Electors 69

3.1 Comparative Report ofMCC Cases 225

3.2 Comparative Report of Law and Order 226
3.3 Preventive Detention in Elections in Uttarakhand 228
3.4 Preventive Detention in Elections in Goa 229
3.5 Preventive Detention Cases in Punjab 232
3.6 Expenditure-Sensitive Constituencies
in the 2014 General Election 253

4.1 Voter Turnout and Male and Female Voter Percentages 261
4.2 Party Types 262
4.3 Supreme Court Judgment and the Ordinance Compared 281
4.4 Statement of Election Expenditure of Political Parties
in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections 306
4.5 Election Expenditure by the Central Government
for 15 Lok Sabha Elections 308 1
C.1 Use ofEVM (2000-18) 342

..
 Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge, jointly and individually, the sup-

port, help, and assistance received from persons and institutions in
the course of writing this book. Research for this work began and
remained in its incipient stages while we were based at the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi, as a fellow
(Ujjwal), and in the Centre for Women's Development Studies, New
Delhi, as a senior fellow (Anupama). We acknowledge the support
that we received from both these institutions.
We are grateful for the feedback received on the papers pre-
. sented on different aspects of the Election Commission of India at
conferences at the following universities: North Carolina State
University, Raleigh, USA; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
USA; University of Delhi (Department of Political Science), India;
Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China; the University of Macau,
China; and Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea. We are
grateful to David Gilmartin, Robert Moog, E. Sridharan, Daniel Tokaji,
M.P. Singh, Milan Vaishnav, and K.K. Kailash for their comments
and suggestions which helped us sharpen the arguments. We are
beholden to Wendy Singer for sharing with us a poster issued by
the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, most likely in 1991,
and for providing us a digital copy of the same. We thank Yamuna
Shankar for permitting us to reproduce three cartoons by Shankar in
the first chapter of this book.
 I x Acknowledgements

Our fieldwork in India was supported by the University Grants

Commission Department of Special Assistance (UGC DSA) pro·
gramme of Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
(JNU), New Delhi, India, and the Faculty Research Fund, University of
Delhi, India. We are grateful to Ajay Naik, Sanjiv Kumar, Vivek Kumar
Dewangan, Priyanka Sinha, Sanjay Kumar Agrawal, and Shahid Iqbal
for sparing time to talk to us about their experiences in conducting
elections at the district and state levels.
Subarta Singh's help in going through the microfilm collection
at the NMML, New Delhi, for newspaper sources pertaining to the
first general election in India, is acknowledged with deep gratitude.
We appreciate the help provided to us by Shipra and Aditya with the
preparation of the images for publication. We would also like to thank
the editors at Oxford University Press for steering this manuscript at
all stages.
We thank our family, in particular, Anatya, our son, for his
encouragement and love. This book, as always, is for him and for
our parents-Lalita Sinha, Usha Roy, Krishna Ballabh Sinha, and
Siddheshwari Narayan Roy.

---
-
-
Abbreviations

AASU All Assam Students Union

ACLU American Civil Liberties Union
ADR Association for Democratic Reforms
AIMIM All-India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen
BDO Block Development Officer
BEL Bharat Electronics Limited
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
BLO Booth-Level Officer
BSP Bahujan Samaj Party
CAG Comptroller and Auditor General of India
CAO Chief Agricultural Officer
CBDT Central Board for Direct Taxes
CEC Chief Election Commissioner
CEO Chief Electoral Officer
CIC Central Information Commission
CII Confederation of Indian Industry
CPI(M) Communist Party of India (Marxist)
CRPF Central Reserve Police Force
CSDS Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
ewe Congress Working Committee
DBT Direct Benefit Transfer
DC District Collector
.
\ xii Abbreviations

\
I DEO District Electoral Officer
DEW Delhi Election Watch
DGP Director General of Police
·DsDv DBT Seeding Data Viewer
ECI Election Commission of India
ECIL Electronics Corporation of India Limited
EIC Economic Intelligence Council
EMB Electoral Management Body
EPIC Electronic Photo Identity Card
ERO Electoral Registration Officer
EVM Electronic Voting Machine
FlU Financial Intelligence Unity
HAVA Help America Vote Act
IEC Information, Education and Communication
IMDT Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal
IPC Indian Penal Code
IPS Indian Police Service
JD(U) Janata Dal (United)
LWE Left-Wing Extremism
MLA Member of Legislative Assembly
MP Member of Parliament
NBW Non-bailable Warrant
NCRWC National Commission to Review the Working of the
Constitution
NERPAP National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication
Programme
NOTA None of the Above
NRI Non-resident Indian ·
NSA National Security Act
NVD National Voters Day
OBC Other Backward Class
PIB Press Information Bureau
1 URE
Proper Urban Electoral List
Rashtriya Janata Dal
Representation of the People Act
RTI Right to Information
RWA Resident Welfare Association
 Abbreviations xiii

sc Scheduled Caste
ST Scheduled Tribe
SVEEP Systematic Voters' Education and Electoral Participation
UIDAI Unique Identification Authority of India
UPA United Progressive Alliance
VVPAT Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail
Introduction

On 23 October 1951, a couple of days before polling began for the first
general election in India, The Hindu carried a brief editorial comment
titled 'The Ensuing Elections', with two subtitles-'Great Experiment
in Democracy' and 'The Working of Adult Franchise'. The editorial
claimed that the election 'should be a simple affair to most of its
voters'. All that the voters had to do was 'to walk a short distance up
to the polling booth on the polling day', which would be a holiday,
and vote twice, first for the State Legislative Assembly and then
for Parliament. The only difficulty that the voters could face, as the
editorial saw it, was in deciding whom to vote for, especially in places
where canvassing by political parties and contesting candidates had
been carried out vigorously enough. 1
On 25 October 1951, Shyam Saran Negi of Kalpa village in
Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh became the first person
to a vote in independent India. Polling for Chini and Pangi
constituencies in Himachal Pradesh took place two months before
the rest of India due to the snowbound conditio.n s and inaccessibility
of these regions in the winter months. Then a school teacher in a
primary school run by the government and part of the polling party,

1 'The Ensuing Elections.' The Hindu, 23 October 1951, p. 4.

 2 Election Commission of India

\ Negi recalled several years later that ballot boxes had to be trans-
.
I
ported on mules on the difficult mountainous terrain. The polling
booth was set up at a height of close to 10,000 feet above sea level
inside a primary school building in the village. The Times of India,
on 26 October 1951, reported the first polls in independent India
on its front page, alongside the news of 'Britons flocking to the
ballot box'. The outcome of the polls in England would have
decided whether Attlee's Labour Party government continued
for another term or was replaced with Churchill's Conservative
Party. Precise figures of the record-breaking turnout in the United
Kingdom were available to the newspaper from London. The
same was, however, not the case for the Indian state of Himachal
Pradesh. The details of how the polling fared in the two tehsils of
Chini and Pangi on the northern borders of India would be known
much later. The means of communicating with the tehsils were
almost none. There was one wireless link, and that was used for
official purposes only.2
The first general election earned the epithet of having been 'an act
offaith',3 not simply because a newly independent country embarked
on the unfamiliar course of universal adult franchise, but also for put-
ting in place an electoral machinery to make the exercise of franchise
possible for one-and-a-half-million voters spread across a vast country,
most of whom had never voted before. Sukumar Sen, the chief elec-
tion commissioner of India (henceforth, CEC) who steered India's
first general elections, recounted the challenges faced by the Election
Commission of India (ECI) in transporting ballot boxes and other
polling material in the hilly areas of Manipur and Tripura. Sen had to
secure the support of the hill chiefs for obtaining a supply of porters
to help negotiate the tough and unfamiliar terrain. In return, the CEC
promised those who helped, by way of reward, a red blanket and a
gun license. While elephants were used to carry the polling material
in some parts of Tripura, in most cases, the polling parties reached
their polling stations on foot, walking a distance of about 40 miles in

· 2
'Polling in Himachal,' The Times of India, 26 October 1951.
3
Referred to as such by Sukumar Sen, the first CEC, in Election
Commission ofl ndia, Report ofthe First General Election of India 1951-52, Vol. I.
New Delhi: Election Commission of India, 1955, p. 16.
 Introduction 3

a day. 4 In Rajasthan, on the other hand, the vast stretches of desert

areas without road, telegraph, and telephone connections compelled
the ECI to arrange high:powered army vehicles for the Banner and
Jalore districts in particular, to help the polling parties commute from
one place to another. The army vehicles, however, often got stuck in
the sand, putting the poll schedule at risk. As a result, all the jeeps
of the state government were procured, pooled together, and sent to
the two districts to enable the completion of the polling programme
according to schedule. In districts like Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, the
polling party moved on camels. A large number of camels were hired
for the purpose and each polling party moved like a caravan carrying
polling parties and equipment. 5 Almost 2,500,000 steel ballot boxes
were used, in addition to the 111,095, wooden boxes that had to be
made subsequently because the number of steel boxes fell short. All
of this cost the Government of India Rs 12,287,349.6
Since the first general election held in 1951-2, the electorate in
India has increased manifold. The electoral data for 2014, released by
the ECI on 14 February 2014, showed more than 4.7 times increase
in the size of the electorate, which grew from 173,21.2,343 million
electors in 1951-2 to 834,101,479 million in the 16th general elec-
tion held in 2014.7 Apart from the magnitude of the elections, their
nature has also changed, alongside changes in the political field and
innovations in electoral strategies and campaigns of political parties.
·The multiple ballot boxes used in the first general election have given
way to electronic voting machines (EVMs) and election campaigns ·
have transformed through the use of technology by political par-
ties, aided by campaign managers and computer professionals. The
door-to-door contacts by political parties have been supplemented by
'informed' and 'mediated' campaigns through print and electronic

4 Election Commission of India, Report of the First General Election of

India, pp. 127-8.
5 Election Commission of India, Report of the First General Election of
India, pp. 127-8.
6 Election Commission of India, Report of the First General Election of

India, p. 98.
7 Press Information Bureau, 'Comparison of the Indian Electorate from

1951-1952 to 2014'. ECI, Government of India, 23 February 2014.

 4 Election Commission of India ·

media. Innovations in campaigns, which give the illusion of direct

personal contact, have abounded. One such experience of a journalist
is narrated below:

I was rushing to attend Govinda's press conference; the Bollywood star

had joined the Congress party and was going to take on BJP stalwart
·
I just about managed to climb onto an Andheri-bound local train
when my cell phone rang. It was an STD call. When I answered, the
first word I heard was a polite 'Namaskar'. ·
\ 'Namaskar', I replied, pleasantly surprised.
II 'Main Atal Bihari Vajpayee bol raha hoon [fhis is Atal Bihari Vajpayee
speaking}', said the voice again. I almost dropped my phone. The voice,
however, continued without a pause. 'Aap ko tatha aapke parivar ko
meri subkamnayein [My best wishes to you and your family). Paanch
saa1 pehle aapne mujhe seva kame ka mauka diya tha, uske liye dhanyavad
[I would like to thank you for the opportunity you gave me five years ago)'·
I listened intently.
Even as he talked about national development and his plans for the
future, my mind began to chum with questions I had always wanted to
ask the prime minister.
Then he said, 'Dhanyavad [fhanks}', and, before I could say a word,
disconnected. I grinned at myself; I had been fooled by the BJP's latest
campaign innovation-a recorded message from the Prime Minister. 8

The 2004 elections witnessed a flood of voice messages from the

then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seeking the voters' coop-
eration in 'taking India to greater heights'. The Business Standard
reported the 'shock' of scores of persons who answered a call on
their cell phone or the landline service provided by Bharat Sanchar
Nigam to hear the unmistakably recognisable voice of the prime
minister greeting them.9 Ten years later, the electoral victories of

8 Vijay Singh, 'Main Atal Bihari Vajpayee Bol Hoon,' [Link],

29 March 2004. Available at http:[Link].comlnewsl2004lmarl
[Link]; accessed on 11 June 2013.
9 Meghdoot Sharon. 2004. 'Namaskaar, Mein Vajpayee Bol Raha ... ,'

Business Standard, 3 April. Available at http:[Link]

article 1economy· policy1namaskaar·mein-va jpayee·bol-raha-104040 301085 _1.
html; accessed on 11 June 2013.
 Introduction 5

the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the parliamentary elections of

2014, and the mahagathbandhan of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD),
the Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)), and the Congress in the Bihar State
Assembly election in 2015, were attributed to the innovative use of
technology. The 3D hologram rallies ofNarendra Modi in 2014 and an
active media cell that planned campaign strategies for Nitish Kumar
in 2015-responding swiftly arid cleverly to all the moves in the BJP's
electoral campaign-generated an altogether new mode of political
communication and electoral competition. These and other changes
generated demands [Link] new challenges for efficient and
effective electoral governance, commensurate with electoral integrity
and democracy.

A Trusted Institution

When the framers of the Indian Constitution provided for an insti-

tution to 'superintend, direct and control' the conduct of elections,
they had envisaged a body that would be sufficiently empowered to
discharge the responsibility of making the exercise of franchise free
and fair. The ECI has since emerged as a significant public institution
within the shared space of democracy in India. Surveys carried out
from time to time have revealed the steadily increasing credibility of
the ECI as a trusted institution. The increase in credibility owes to
the ways in which electoral governance has unfolded over the years,
and the manner in which the electoral system has been constituted
through enduring rules and structures ensuring procedural certainty.
The nature and magnitude of the task that the ECI has been perform-
ing may be seen as having contributed substantially to the consolida-
tion of the electoral system. As an institution primarily responsible
for administering and regulating the electoral space, between and
through each electoral trial, the ECI has enhanced this faith over the
years. The general election in 1977, for example, in which the ECI
exhorted the voters to 'vote without fear', brought it into the public
arena as an institution entrusted with carrying out the constitutional
mandate of 'fair and free' elections.
A myriad of other commissions that exist in the institutional
space of democracy in India, including the National Commission
for Minorities, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, the
& Election Commission of India

National Human Rights Commission, and the National Commission

for Women, to name a few, are statutory bodies. They owe their ori-
gins to specific laws of Parliament and have as their objectives the
protection of the rights of particular groups. The ECI, on the other
hand, quite like the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG),
a different pedigree, which generates a different set of rules of
recognition and source of validation of its authority. 10 Provided for by
the Constitution of India (Article 324), the ECI does not owe its exis-
tence to an Act of Parliament. Moreover, as the Constituent Assembly
Debates discussed later would show, the ECI is an institution that cap-
tures the essence of the foundational moment of the transformative
in which the Constitution of India was being framed.11 Unlike other
administrative institutions of the state such as the police, the bureau-
cracy, and the army, which embodied the structural logic of 'rule and
authority'-as residuum of the colonial state, considered essential for
the expansion of the ruling apparatus of the state and the sustenance
of its structural field of'power-effects' (Scott 1995)-the ECI signified
the fundamental rupture that independence from colonial rule was
to bring in its wake. While a number of innovations in the Indian
Constitution emulated or borrowed from other constitutional cul-
tures, there was no existing precedent for an election commission of
the kind envisaged by the makers of the Indian Constitution. Indeed,

10
Ronald Dworkin (1967: 17) refers to the 'pedigree' of rules, that is, the
manner in which they were adopted or developed as distinct from their con-
tent. The pedigree of rules constitute the standards by which they may be
distinguished from spurious legal rules, which lawyers and litigants wrongly
argue are rules of law, and also from other social rules, which are generally
clubbed together as moral rules, that the community follows, but which are
not enforceable through public power.
11 The camaraderie of equal citizenship was at the heart of the constitutive

moment, of the transforrnative that characterised the new constitution. A

central motif of this transforrnative moment was conscious and meticulous
sequestering from the past and the refiguration of this relationship. In order
for the present to transform itself into a constituent moment, a remarkable
capacity for being autochthonous in the domain of law and government,
and liberation from domestication and subjection-which characterised
colonial rule-had to be displayed (Baxi 2008b; P.B. Mehta 2010; Roy 2010;
U. Mehta 2010).
 Introduction 7

as an expression of the transformative in the republican constitution,

the ECI embodied 'the desire to have a democratic process that
was institutionally entrenched, and yet at an arms-length [sic] from
party-political or governmental interference' (McMillan 2012: 187).
For some time now, especially since the 1990s, the ECI has come
to be seen as a regulatory body (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001), which
performs a set of rule enforcement functions pertaining to the
conduct of elections, sustaining, thereby, the vitality of the electoral
system. The ECI is often also seen as an institution that reflects the
sagacity of the Constituent Assembly in providing a constitutional
body. that would guard against self-destructive tendencies within
democracies, by performing an oversight function over the conduct
of elections (Thiruvengadam 2017: 138). Devesh Kapur and Pratap
Bhanu Mehta (2005) have referred to the ECI as a 'referee institution',
while James Lyngdoh (2004), former CEC, sees the ECI performing
the role of a 'pitcher'. The expansion and entrenchment of the ECI's
powers of administering elections have, however, been considered a
case of administrative overreach and the 'stretching' of its 'regulatory
powers' (McMillan 2012; Katju 2009). Questions pertaining to the
limits of the ECI's powers and its relationship with other institutions,
especially Parliament and the Supreme Court, have subsequently
been posed.
In this work, we argue that the ECI can be seen as performing a
.range of overlapping functions, not all of which are regulatory. The
pedigree of the ECI's powers, which can be traced to Article 324 in the
constitutional architecture, has paved the way for the Article becom-
ing, through authoritative judicial interpretations, a repository of the
ECI's powers. These powers buttress the autonomy of the ECI, mak-
ing it also a site of contestation between the ECI and different political
regimes. The roots of this contestation lie in the paradoxical location
of the ECI in the institutional space of democracy in India, whereby
it is located in the domain of the state, but is driven by the logic of
democracy. The logic of democracy specific to the ECI can be seen in
the various strands of the debate in the Constituent Assembly, which
were concerned with the objective of achieving democratic citizen-
ship. Yet, this logic was also animated by an enduring quest for proce-
dural certainty to ensure the democratic uncertainty ofelectoral outcome,
and electoral integrity to assure the deliberative content of election.
8 Election Commission of India

The Paradox
The ECI adopted a practice of preparing a narrative report of every
general election from 1951-2 to 1983, after which it presented
annual reports to Parliament. Neither of the two practices was a
requirement in the Constitution oflndia or the election law. Sukumar
Sen considered this a desirable exercise even when there was no con-
stitutional or statutory requirement, so that an exhaustive record of
the ECI's experiences in administering elections could be prepared
and preserved for later reference, especially for the purposes of sug-
gesting reforms in election law and procedure. 12 The narrative reports
of the ECI present a documentation of the bureaucratic practices that
accumulated within the legal and institutional frameworks of elec-
toral governance. These documents may well be read as comprising
a record of the activities of the ECI, expressing the ways in which
institutions acquire an identity through a replication of bureaucratic
practices associated with the processes of structuration within the
state. At the same time, however, in its narrative reports, the ECI may
also be seen as invoking a distinctive identity, wherein it stands apart
from the political apparatus of the state-as an institution of a differ-
ent kind-as the custodian of the right of the citizens to vote and an
enabler of informed political choice among citizens.
It is this paradox of its location in the bureaucratic apparatus of
the state, while simultaneously entrusted with the responsibility of
enabling regime change through a democratic exercise of political
choice by the people, that makes the ECI an institution difficult to
study. The ECI is at one level indistinguishable from the logic of the
state. As part of the institutional ensemble of the state, it exhibits the
characteristics of a governmental institution wearing the 'masks' of
secrecy, inaccessibility, and authority. As an integrated and hierarchi-
cally organised bureaucratic structure, it shares with the state the
pursuit of legitimacy through the electoral domain. Yet, the ECI is
part of the logic of democracy-the quest to build and consolidate a
democratic polity and buttress it against collapse-by providing the
institutional mechanisms through which consent can be mobilised

12 Election Commission of India, Report on the First General Election of

India 1951-52, Vol. I.
 Introduction 9

democratically, imd dissent leading to regime change, registered

peacefully.
The difficulty of studying the ECI emerges precisely from its
ambivalent location in the public domain where it contributes to the
'structuration' of the state but does not form part of what Abrams
(1988: 58) calls the 'palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure
centred in government'. All public institutions represent aspects of
state power-procedural and formal, as·well as ideological, hegemonic,
and regulatory-to different degrees, in their structure and functions.
They also reflect the conflict that lies at the heart of modern politics
between 'universal ideals' such as, civic nationalism, individual free-
doms, and equal rights, and 'particular demands' of cultural identity,
which call for group-differentiated treatment on grounds of vulner-
ability, backwardness, or historical injustice (Chatterjee 2004: 4). This
conflict, according to Chatterjee (2004: 5-6), represents the transition
that occurred in modern politics in the course of the twentieth cen-
tury 'from a conception of democratic politics grounded in the idea
of popular sovereignty to one in which democratic politics is shaped
by governmentality'. In the introduction to their anthology on public
institutions in India, Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (2005)
argue that institutions and institutional processes are committed to
procedures as well as the formal and informal incentives within state
institutions. It is through procedural effects that the state is 'constituted
and enabled to act on the one hand and constrained in its powers
and capacities on. the other' (Kapur and Mehta 2005: 2). While all
three-Chatterjee, Kapur, and Mehta--concur that contestations in
the domain of the shape institutional forms and practices, they
differ on their emphasis on the modalities through which state power
is exercised in institutional practices. If Chatterjee makes a distinction
between the exercise of sovereign power and govemmentality, Kapur
and Mehta emphasise the way in which institutions act rationally and
weigh their choices by taking into consideration the consequences of
adopting a particular course of action for the durability of the institution.
While institutional functions contribute to state formation and
accumulation of state power, institutions themselves acquire distinc-
tive attributes corresponding to their functions through an amalga-
mation of clusters of rules and practices that endure over a period
of time. The identity and effectiveness of institutions may be drawn
 10 Election Commission of India

entirely from these rules irrespective of who interprets and executes

them, but they may also be dependent on particular individuals who
are in charge of deciding how the rules are to be interpreted and
implemented. The larger political field, its composition, and nature
of social and political contests that constitute it-in other words, the
complex set of inter-relationships in which an institution is located-
also have an impact on an institution's identity and character. The ECI
as an institution may be seen as functioning in a field where a range
of institutions 'interlock' in a constellation, within which they func-
tion with 'a broad-based ideological vision', but also 'compete with

l
each other, set bounds on what other institutions can do (and] interpret
directives in their own way' (Kapur and Mehta 2005: 1).
lI It may be argued that the ECI has emerged as a significant insti-
tution within the common political space of democracy in India. In
no small measure, this is a consequence of the institutionalisation
of procedural certainties embodied in the functioning of the ECI.
The statutory framework and institutional structures of electoral
governance are entrenched in specific socio-historical contexts and
substantive notions of democracy, with philosophical underpinnings
of self-determination, freedom, and equality, all of which make for
democratic participation the generation of a democratic public
space. These statutory and institutional arrangements provide endur-
ing frameworks of democratic governance that unfold in the institu-
tional space of modern democracies. In order for rules and procedures
of electoral governance to be conducive to democracy, they should
generate 'a radical uncertainty about authority', through certainty of
procedures. Such procedures give momentum to participation and
release processes of critique that 'question and subvert all certainties
of social life', 'lead to mobilisation of new groups', 'unsettle existing
power relations', and 'produce new openings' .13

Procedural Certainties and Democratic Uncertainties

The electoral process involves much more than periodic acts of
voting and competition among political parties for forming the

13Pratap Bhanu Mehta (2003: 11) writes about the transformations in the
meaning of social existence that the right to vote brings.
 Introduction 11

government. It involves some enduring rules and institutional

structures that must ensure procedural certainty. Procedural cer-
tainty may be regarded as the principal task of electoral governance,
helping to ensure the democratic principle of uncertainty of elec-
toral outcome. The constitutional provisions and legislative enact-
ments that govern the conduct of elections in India along with the
institutional structures, it may be argued, have been designed to
achieve this democratic principle. Electoral governance, compris-
ing a set of related activities, including the making, implementa-
tion, and adjudication of rules, determines the framework within
. which the substantive uncertainty of democratic elections unfold.14
Mozaffar and Schedler (2002) consider the principle of procedural
certainty an essential principle of electoral governance in societies
which are 'democratising' as well as for long-sustaining democ-
racies where elections have become 'routine', in order to make
them 'credible'.
Apart from laying down the rules of the electoral game and organ-
. ising them for procedural certainty, questions concerning whether
the procedures designed to conduct elections are appropriate and
can achieve the objective of democratic uncertainty of elections are
also important. The evaluative frameworks for assessing the appro-
priateness of procedures concern themselves largely with the ques-
tion, whether or not and to what degree, the integrity of the electoral
system is maintained. Comparative studies of 'electoral integrity'
have identified certain standards to evaluate the degree of integrity

14 Shaheen Mozaffar and Andreas Schedler (2002: 8) elaborate on these

functions as follows:
Rule making: 'choosing and defining the basic rules of the electoral
game', namely, rules ofelectoral competition including the delimitation
of constituencies, choosing one system of election over the other,
electoral time table, rules governing franchise, voter registration etc.;
Rule application: 'organising the electoral game' including the
registration of voters, candidates, parties etc., registration of election
observers, voter education, voting, counting and reporting;
Rule adjudication: 'certifying election results and resolving disputes'
including admission ofcomplaints, processing ofcases, and publication
of implementation of rulings.
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