Privacy of voting in India

Question

Is the voting process in India really a private affair?

Recently, an MLA belonging to the ruling party has threatened voters that Prime Minister Modi has installed cameras in the polling booth through which people who vote for the opposition can be identified. He also threatens people of consequences after the election through such identification. Cabinet Minister Maneka Gandhi also threatens voters saying that village and communities that don't vote for her will not be given funds and work.

Is it just a coincidence that a large number of such incidences are happening with regularity or is voting no longer secret in India?

Answer 1

There are two parts to this question which refer to two different granularities.

The first part of your question regards a vote at the personal level. The threat of cameras in the polling station is exactly that: a threat. It would be very expensive indeed to put a camera in each polling booth in the country, and there is no evidence to suggest that this is taking place.

The second part of your question regards a vote at a community level. As you would expect in a Parliamentary democracy, the number of votes for each party within each constituency is known (for example, we know that the BJP got around 2/3 of the votes in Jaipur in 2014).

It is difficult to get more fine-grained figures than this (at least the Electoral Commission doesn't publish them). However, a keen-eyed counting agent (someone appointed by a candidate to make sure there's no funny business) might be able to work out which EVM came from which polling place and report that back to the party, though any such figures would need to be taken with the previso that it's not necessarily reliable nor official.