At another table, a non-partisan polling official takes the slip, checks your name a second time, hands over a ballot paper and puts a streak of indelible ink across the index fingernail to deter you from coming back for more.How voters who are not known supporters of a particular party get past the first table was not apparent, but I was assured that it is possible At Ghaziabad no boxes were on fire so I soon drove on. At the next polling station I visited all was not absolutely well.Noida is another raw new town east of Delhi. As in Ghaziabad, politics and crime are closely interfolded here, with organised gangsters protected by political patrons and therefore strongly motivated to see that their patrons win.Unlike Ghaziabad, security was genuinely tight here, traffic barred from entering the area, the press among the few exempt. Noida supposedly had 111 "supersensitive" polling stations where high security was in force The one I visited was calm.
But when I asked who was winning, the polling officer answered rather too quickly, "The BJP by a mile!" and smirked. If a BJP partisan was in control of the polling station, no amount of police could prevent the election being rigged.Saturday's series of explosions in the southern city of Coimbatore, in which 48 people died, many at a BJP campaign rally, raised fears that this election might be marred by an upsurge of Hindu versus Muslim communal violence So far that has yet to happen. In Bihar, where the polling officer was strangled, 12 other people died in polling day violence yesterday. In several nearby constituencies, "history-sheeters" - people with a long history of being charged with crimes, or "charge-sheeted" as the Hinglish term has it - are standing for election. Elsewhere, confirmed gangsters, kidnappers and murderers operate with the protection of MPs. One way such people influence election results is by "booth-capturing" - staging raids on polling stations, setting them on fire, seizing ballot papers, marking them for their favoured candidate and stuffing the boxes; even (as happened in Bihar state yesterday), strangling the polling officer.But India has 900,000 polling stations staffed by 4.5 million election officials, so one's chances of stumbling upon something gruesomely irregular are slim.
I tried to improve the odds by going first to Ghaziabad, a ramshackle city an hour east of Delhi, where trouble was expected.At the entrance of a half-built school, police with breech-loading rifles looked on laconically as the citizens filed in The procedure at an Indian polling station is as follows. I SET OFF yesterday morning for the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, with booth-capturing history-sheeters on my mind. Two hundred and twenty two of India's 545 constituencies voted in the general election, including Delhi, and much of the north. He says Indians must be encouraged to retain and spread their knowledge of the medicinal powers of local plants in their own countries, growing herb gardens.. The worms depend on serotonin, the "happiness" chemical used to signal between nerve cells, from their hosts to function normally.
