I first heard of “scientific rigging” early in 1998, soon after Mamata Banerjee founded the Trinamool Congress and embarked on her angry one-woman crusade to end the Left rule in West Bengal, which is now in its fourth decade. And that summer, I learned of the even more intriguing crime of “scientific rape”. When one of her women candidates lost the panchayat elections, Banerjee claimed that the CPI(M) had raped her. Sadly, the Central Forensic Laboratory failed to find evidence of rape. Naturally, said Banerjee, undeterred by mere facts – it was a scientific rape. Like the CPI(M)’s scientific rigging, it was very difficult to detect.

Scientific rape is a forensic impossibility, but the existence of scientific rigging is widely acknowledged in West Bengal. And now that Banerjee is a central minister, she has carried the news to Delhi and chewed the ear of home minister P Chidambaram. In January, the bhadralok of Kolkata choked on their morning cup of Darjeeling when the papers reported that the election commission had sent five top IPS officers to their city, along with the chief electoral officer of Bihar, who oversaw peaceful elections in that infamously violent state last year. Their mandate: to ensure that illicit arms are seized, non-bailable warrants executed and political thugs taken into preventive custody before the assembly elections in May.

This unprecedented step followed a shocking massacre in the village of Netai, where eight people were shot dead at an armed camp run by the harmad bahini (loosely, illicit militia) of the CPI(M). And, of course, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was summoned to Delhi to get a dressing-down from the union home minister and the prime minister.
Banerjee first scored in her war on scientific rigging in March 2009, when she presented the chief election commissioner, who was visiting Kolkata, with a list of 46,000 bogus voters in the constituencies of Kolkata South and Jadavpur. EC officials randomly checked 120 of the names and found that 53 had the same unique voter ID number.

Excellent work, except that in the decade and a half in which Banerjee’s party has grown unstoppably, it has also learned the rudiments of scientific rigging. While it now has a more visible footprint in Delhi than the CPI(M) and is poised to wipe the floor with the ruling party in the state, it may also have taken organised political violence, the decisive component of the process, to a whole new level.

Shortly after the Netai massacre left the Left red-faced, the Maoists confirmed, through their official spokesperson Bikram, what was always suspected about the Trinamool Congress – that it had a long-term entente with the far Left, which it had supported in the violent anti-industry agitations at Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh. The message clearly thanked the Trinamool Congress for its support. The link between the two organisations was later confirmed by the CID.

Even more damning was a release from Bikram which followed a week later, which assured Banerjee that the Maoists would break with tradition and not boycott the forthcoming polls but rather support her bid for the chief minister’s post if she quit the UPA government and fought both the Left Front and the Congress in the state.

Both the Trinamool and the Left are now playing the same game, illegally settling by force of arms questions which should be decided by the democratic political process. Who rules the state is now determined by gladiatorial tournaments rather than elections. The number of polling booths on the critical list has trebled since 2006, mirroring the rise in political violence as the Trinamool Congress learns the ropes of scientific rigging. Some 21,000 booths are now deemed to require protection. The rise has been 400 percent in the district of East Midnapore, almost 800 percent in Birbhum and an unbelievable 2,100 percent in Hooghly. Kolkata, the state capital, has almost 1,000 critical booths. Significantly, this phenomenon is seen in districts where the Trinamool Congress is growing fast, not those which are most significantly affected by Maoist violence.

Administratively, this is a nightmare. If all pending non-bailable warrants are executed before the polls, as the election commission requires, almost 66,000 thugs would have to be clapped in irons. The EC also wants political goons to be taken into preventive custody, which could see the figure rising much closer to a lakh. Every one of West Bengal’s detention facilities would become a Black Hole of Calcutta. What should the police do? Outsource to detention camps in Dandakaranya, perhaps?

The legal implications are just as absurdly daunting. The ruling party has raised a heavily armed militia to subjugate its own people. These are paid troops – the killers at Netai were reportedly on daily wages of Rs 200, plus food and accommodation. Under the constitution, the state has a monopoly on the organised use of armed violence, and individuals or organisations cannot raise armies. Should the chief minister of West Bengal be prosecuted for this clearly illegal act, since an army could not have been raised without his knowledge?

And should the chief minister in waiting be prosecuted, too? Binayak Sen was awarded a life sentence for the crime of associating with Maoists. A leading exhibit of the prosecution was a letter, allegedly from Maoists, thanking him for his work. It did not elaborate on the nature of this ‘work’ and since Sen is a practising rural doctor, the message could simply have referred to his commitment to public health. This isn’t exactly bulletproof evidence and anyway, the defence argued convincingly that it had been planted. Even so, the court thought it was good enough to convict Sen. So should Trinamool chief and union minister for railways Mamata Banerjee be prosecuted on similar grounds, since the Maoists have thanked her rather more fulsomely, definitively and publicly than they thanked Sen?

Obviously, nothing of the sort will happen and in May, the voter will be presented with the devil’s alternative, where both the ruling party and the leading party of the opposition have lost credibility and stand accused of using or condoning the use of criminal violence. And their response to this crisis of confidence has been limited to slinging mud at each other, instead of trying to clean up their act.

The solution to this crisis lies with the Left, which originated the violent, coercive politics which the Trinamool Congress has inherited and fine-tuned. In fact, there are many in the old guard of the CPI(M) who now want to gracefully accept the electoral defeat which is staring them in the face this year. They want to take some time out and try and recapture the spirit of the old days, when the Left did not stoop to criminal intimidation of the people, when it was respected for insisting on probity in public life and the pursuit of equity and humanity in its politics. But unfortunately, they are outnumbered by younger people fearful of losing their carefully cultivated fiefdoms, who want to fight to the bitter end, using every dirty trick in the trade.

Perhaps this election will bring a change of guard to the government after more than three decades of uninterrupted Left rule, but nothing else will change. The cult of armed violence which began in the Jyoti Basu era is now institutionalised. It has become the default method of doing politics. The good work will be carried forward by whoever gains office this summer and West Bengal will remain as undemocratic as ever.

But should we be worrying about these weighty matters at all? For all we know, ‘scientific rigging’ may have already decided who will win the election. In West Bengal, the electorate has been robbed of its vote and its voice. Or, to borrow a technical term that Banerjee would love to forget, it has been ‘scientifically raped’, by both the ruling party and the opposition.

A rough guide to ‘scientific rigging’

In West Bengal, people wear their political affiliation on their sleeve and vote in blocks. Whole villages vote together for or against the ruling party. Even in the cities, neighbourhoods, streets or clusters of houses tend to vote in a similar fashion. The pattern may be broken by other commitments like trade union affiliations or commercial interest, but generally the pattern holds.

Clustering makes it easier to monitor and manipulate the electorate, and fighting an election is no different from waging a war since the objective is to win geographical territory. This territorial instinct in state politics was seen to best advantage when Lalgarh was “lost” when the ruling party and its administrators were kicked out by the locals, and “reclaimed” by columns of motorcycle-borne CPI(M) thugs.

As advertised, scientific rigging is difficult to detect. It is based on slow, painstaking accumulation of what spooks call ‘human intelligence’, collected by lakhs of cadres on the streets and at the grassroots. They get to know every voter in the state by name, by face, by his or her address and political inclinations. Then they operationalise the data to tamper with the electoral process, using methods which range from soft through sophisticated all the way to brutal.

Speaking softly
As in other states, political parties provide services like electricity connections and running water to their supporters and try to deny them to their opponents. And then they put on the screws, gently at first. The target of scientific rigging is usually achieved simply by getting a few cadres to walk past your house and politely ask how you’re doing. Well? How nice, let’s hope it stays that way. And if it doesn’t, you know we’re always here for you. Cheerfully solicitous veiled threats are usually enough to make the voter come quietly.

The sharp instrument
West Bengal is unique in that the ruling party has taken control of the basis of elections – the voter list. The long-term strategy is to retain committed voters on the list while trying to exclude opponents. The names of people inimical to the ruling party routinely fall off the list and are very difficult to reinstate. Immigrants and temporary residents with anti-Left sentiments find themselves unwanted. The freshly dead, on the other hand, are in great demand because bogus voters can cast their ballot unchallenged. The numbers per booth are obviously much smaller than those involved in quick and dirty methods like booth capturing and ballot stuffing, but they add up over the years and across a constituency. And since the rigging is scattered, incremental and almost undetectable, there is little risk of polls being countermanded. 

Brute force
In the poll season, scientific rigging impatiently drops all pretences of sophistication and turns into a blunt instrument. Party cadres make an example of a few of their opponents, take whole regions hostage through flash bandhs and strikes, and generally create a coercive atmosphere to secure the vote in their favour. In swing constituencies, they unleash a reign of terror to keep voters of the other side safely at home. Their own voters are the only ones who dare to come out and the result swings in their favour.

The season is on now in West Bengal. It opened in autumn and, after a brief break for Durga Puja, it is picking up nicely. The incidence of political violence will increase as the polls draw closer. Summoned to Delhi by the union home minister, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee promised to dismantle the camps of the harmad bahini, but it will probably have no effect. Violence will persist and, indeed, intensify because that is how politics has come to be done in the state, and none of the players knows any better.