On Foregrounding the Backdrops

Duty Bound!

Election Duty spells alarm for many an employee, of schools and colleges, like me. The Pre-election lethargy grips long before the Election Commission order arrives. The casual meetings begin to echo the ‘you-remember- how-it-was-last-time’ and ‘why-should-there-be-elections-I-wonder’ musings. The small talks reflect worry and apprehensions mount. Many quietly knock the back door to evade the Duty via new-found difficulties! Once a professor sought exemption stating his strong political affiliation made political impartiality impossible, leave alone those who file nomination papers!

But I have started realising that the two-day Election Duty offers many positives to be taken home. The first thing it does is to bundle a different bunch of people from various fields together. Hence, as Election Commission’s Officer’s Handbook states, team work is on top of the agenda. The presiding officer, polling officers and the assistants work with shared responsibilities, involved decision making and empathy. When the team arrives at the polling station, they got to start from the scratch, be it food or shelter. We need to share the available room to sleep and then in the morning go through the rituals of daily lives. The rotation of turns and sharing of scant utilities is a wake-up call to many of us.  It is surprising to see the amount of camaraderie that often blooms among the members of a team, though necessitated by the ‘get it done with and get away’ spirit!  The often spoken about government employee ego shrinks and the egalitarian spirit takes over. Can’t we do with occasional doses of this? 

The election Duty is an exercise in sharpening precision in performance too. The paperwork involved in the process is what often worries the presiding officers. There is a form to be filled, in duplicate or in triplicate, for everything that happens or doesn’t happen during the Duty. The blind voter, tendered votes, challenges, gum bottle, cardboards etc - all are listed and recorded. But these endless forms and reports keep one on toes and contribute to more care and precision in the work.

The focus on precision points to the accountability the process demands. The years of rust which has begun to rest on the way we go about with our duties in schools and colleges have brought its own wear and tear.  The Election Duty reminds us of the possible seriousness of our regular work and how to lend more accountability to it. Since the presiding officer has to answer for each and every brick (un!)laid in the polling process, utmost care is given during each step.

From the acceptance of polling materials to its return, we have our time cut out. The Election Commission Handbook precisely sequences the moves and the timings on the eve of, before, during and after polling. This calls for stringent time management. The polling day is broken down to series of meticulous tasks. Lag in one can trigger chaos and derail the whole process. Alertness in checking IDs, obtaining signatures, marking the voters, observing the Agents, preparing statements, well, it’s a real education for the service softened teachers like me in fine tuning the time management essentials.  

The root of the Election Duty phobia lies in the political unrest we invariably foresee. Bogus votes, inter-agent disputes, voter card issues or the supposedly blind voters can trigger easy violence. This where the significance of tact lies. While asserting the rules and the clauses, the Election Officials remind us to handle situations with tact. Tact doesn’t lie in grabbing and handing a bogus voter to the police. Tact is talking him away from the act. Tact lies in handling conflict situations with the right mix of authority and persuasion, human warmth and bureaucratic fixity. The election Duty exercise is thus a creditable exposure to practising expediency too.

The final hurdle of the Duty is when the polling materials are handed back.  We present the material packet by packet, cover after cover, sealed or not, duplicates or triplicates. The ordering of covers, preparation of details, sequencing forms, the precision and method summarises the whole gain of the event. Well, notwithstanding the foregrounding of the ‘other perspective’, the wait for the coming assembly election Duty is not without apprehension!