With less than a month left for Assembly Elections slated for February 23, 2013, the biggest question that begs an answer is whether the coming election in Nagaland can be held in a free and fair manner, breaking away from the past tradition of money, muscle and modhu (liquor) power. There are reasons to believe that unlike in past election, the Naga public including the politicians and political parties are much more aware of the need to have free, fair and clean election. As rightly mentioned by the Chief Electoral Officer of Nagaland J. Alam almost every election is an improvement over the previous one. And based on this expectation, the CEO is hopeful like this column that our State and its people can do much better than the last elections. According to the CEO, the main improvements over the last elections are that this time we have photo electoral rolls and photo identity slips are going to be issued to all the voters. The other significant difference according to the CEO is that the voter lists have been “greatly cleaned” and according to him this is the “cleanest voter lists in the history of our State”. There is no doubt that in the present CEO along with the Election Commission of India, has laid down the groundwork for conducting a better and much improved election. While in paper, things are indeed looking good to expect free and fair election, nevertheless the CEO will himself admit to the fact that guidelines and strictures are one thing on paper but the bigger challenge will be to enforce the same on the ground.
The CEO may be making elaborate arrangements to ensure free, fair and peaceful elections in the State. However if political parties, candidates or the community does not cooperate in this effort, the objectives no matter how well written or designed will not be met. These days our local dailies are splashed with advertisement in the nature of vote bank politics. It appears to be the case that it is more difficult to educate the Naga public. In reality there seems to be no meaning to all the appeal and awareness created by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council for conducting Clean Election campaign to eliminate malpractices that have plagued our election process in the past. The CEO may be educating citizens to come out and cast their votes as each person’s vote is his or her right, voice and duty. However the CEO can perhaps answer as to how this one person one vote can be guaranteed when there is already diktats and warning issued by clans, khels, tribes and villages to cast vote for a candidate. Let alone such diktats, it is highly unlikely that given the tradition of collective decision making, the possibility of even casting one’s vote does not arise. Given the state of affairs in Naga society where the rule of law does not seem to apply, it will be interesting to see how the General Observers, Election Expenditure Monitoring, Micro Observers and the other checks and balances put in place by the ECI can be enforced. The notion of free and fair elections in Nagaland is an idea whose time has still not come. Perhaps as the CEO mentioned somewhere, almost every election is an improvement over the previous one. We should at the least guarantee that.
