can you imagine: a 5 phase election with 800,000 polling places?

[ensho]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KC10Df02.html



The beast that is Indian democracy


There is a tired old joke among journalists in India that even passing social fads, special interest groups or local cults on the sub-continent could touch as many numbers as some Western democracies have in terms of total population. (Appropriately enough for a country that invented the zero, it has a lot of uses for that digit - as the millennium turned, it added a zero to its own population figure to make it 1 billion.) And there's nothing like an Indian national election to unfurl the full scope of this vast human capital - the majesty, the rancor, the sound of millions of people bargaining all at once.

-snip-

India preparing to vote means an electorate of 714 million people getting ready to elect their representatives to the 543-member Lower House of parliament, or the Lok Sabha. This cannot be a smooth, swift, one-day polling for a variety of reasons. Primarily, the state's administrative and security infrastructure would be stretched beyond limit: it cannot swallow the beast whole and must take it in five (not-very-easy) installments.

Security is a key word here. Indian elections are in any case host to their own endemic forms of violence - whether accompanied by gunpowder or executed with the sturdy Indian lathi, a six-foot wooden stick wielded with equal felicity by police and political goons. Add to this the current South Asian milieu, where ordinary lives seem to be under constant threat from the unknown backpacking gunman who dispenses his affections rather at random.

Thus, the dates and the geographical patterns of the actual voting - in as many as 800,000 polling booths across the country - have been carefully plotted to facilitate the movement of 877 companies of paramilitary forces and 2.1 million home guards, without whose surveillance the elections could not possibly take place. The five phases of the elections are spread between April 16 to May 16, the latter being the date on which we will (hopefully) know what sort of government will take India into the next decade.
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double Wow!