Re-poll in the hills and its implication
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: March 05, 2012 -

Satyajit Usham from the desk

Among numerous firsts, the elections to the 10th Manipur Legislative Assembly would go down in the electoral history of the state for the number of re-polls ordered, that too, all in the Assembly Constituencies of the hill districts.

After the violent marred polling to the 60-member Assembly on January 28, Election Commission of India (ECI) woke up to the need of ordering the first re-poll in 34 polling stations spread across 11 Assembly Constituencies in 5 hill districts of the state on February 4.

Exactly, a month after the first re-poll, the second re-poll was witnessed today in the 67 polling stations spread across 9 Assembly Constituencies of the five hill districts.

Of these 67 polling stations, electorates in 5 polling stations, two in Chandel Assembly Constituency under Chandel district and three in Tadubi Assembly Constituency under Senapati district have already exercise their franchise in the first re-poll as well.

ECI has deemed it fit to order the second re-poll in the wake of numerous irregularities detected during the process of verifying and comparing the photographs of electorates taken at the time of casting their votes with those appeared in the Electoral Rolls.

Now, the dust of the second re-poll have not yet been settled, but it is becoming evidently cleared that another fresh round of re-poll for the third time in the state is in the offing in some remote polling stations, where polling personnel could not reach in time for duty today on account landslides blocking their way.

Repeated re-poll in polling stations of the Assembly Constituencies in the hill districts has once again raised some serious questions over the voting behaviour of the electorates in the hill districts of Manipur.

In the 60-member Manipur Legislative Assembly, the hill districts account for 20 seats which include 19 reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) while one seat, that of, Kangpokpi in Senapati district is a general seat. Of the total 17,40,576 voters in the State, 7,07,143 voters are in the 20 Assembly constituencies of the hill districts.

Despite sealed lips among these over 7 lakhs voters and shrewd denials from power-that-be, how the conduct of electoral process in the hill districts of Manipur has always remained under the control of 'some mighty people' is not an open secret.

Behind the perceived unity among the electorates who supposedly fall in line to the decision announced by their village chiefs, there is fear of reprisal at the back of the mind of everyone.

In such a situation, the question of enjoying electoral rights by the people in the hill is nowhere near the picture-frame.

Moreover, election after election, it has been seen that most of the electorates, who originally hail from the hills but are living/settling in valley areas for work or some other purposes, have double enrolment in the Electoral Rolls and they are the main culprits behind the practice of double-voting/proxy voting.

With necessity of issuing orders for re-poll one after another, the stiff measures put in place by ECI this time for ensuring free and fair election may have come under severe criticism some quarters, but it has definitely succeeded in lifting the lid off a Pandoxa box, the evils inside of which need to be exorcised.

The sooner, the better.