Situational Prevention and Elections in India
Abstract:
Elections in India are major administrative problems due to the sheer size of the electorate and the geographical expanse of the country. In the 2004 elections there were an estimated 600 million eligible voters and the voting percentage was around 58%. This implied that around 360 million people actually stood in queues to cast their vote. Further, around 1.2 million police personnel were deployed to provide security during the election period. In the democratic polity of the country elections are always combative and require major administrative and police arrangements. Unfortunately, since the sixties elections have been vitiated by the involvement of anti-social elements who were hired to provide muscle power to the candidates and intimidate opponents. Now, many of these criminals have begun to contest the elections. State assemblies as well as the national parliament are witness to the strange phenomenon of charge-sheeted criminals serving as ministers in the government. This so called criminalization of politics is playing havoc with the election process and raising questions about the integrity of the democratic process. The Election Commission and the police administrators have evolved several promising situational preventive mechanisms to deal with this influx of criminalization in the voting process. This paper presents the problems of election process in India and the application of situational prevention techniques in dealing with them.
Keyword:
India, Democracy, Elections, Situational Prevention, Police.
