Meeting in 2007, officials from India's elections administration, the Election Commission of India, sought a new approach to dampen conflict during campaign periods. At polling places throughout the country, thugs (known as "gundas" in local parlance) hired by campaigners often intimidated, harassed, threatened, or bribed citizens -- preventing them from casting their ballots. In one example, non-registered voters descended on polling stations to deliberately lengthen lines and frustrate legitimate voters into going home. Not only did such activities disenfranchise many voters, they also resulted in violence and sometimes death.
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S.K. Mendiratta, a longtime member of the commission, recalled: "We were thinking, ‘How can this situation [the fraud and violence] be controlled so that people are encouraged to come out and vote?'" Mendiratta said the public was increasingly aggrieved that "in an independent India, we are not free to vote."
The stakes were high. Roughly 714 million registered voters were eligible to cast ballots in the up-coming 2009 national parliamentary elections. Limited police resources intensified the problem; there were not enough uniformed personnel to guard every one of the country's 828,000 polling places. The problem was further exacerbated by ruling parties that chose to send security to where it would suit their candidates, as opposed to where it was needed to help citizens. But chief electoral officers had legal authority over the heads of police in each state, and as a result, the commission decided to focus its efforts on those areas where violence was most likely.
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The commission worked on a new technique: "vulnerability mapping," designed to help identify which polling places would be most prone to thuggery. Using their knowledge of sensitive areas, country-level officials developed vulnerability mapping to efficiently allocate police and paramilitary forces to states and polling districts that were more susceptible to fraud and violence.
The inspiration for "vulnerability mapping" originated from West Bengal's 2006 state assembly elections. In 2006, Debashis Sen, the state's chief electoral officer, had been in his post for only three months when he approached R. Balakrishna, the head of India's election commission's planning division. Sen explained to Balakrishna that the majority of West Bengal's citizens had little faith in the national commission. In past elections, the state -- India's fourth most populous -- encountered widespread fraud and political party violence, complicated by a 30-year-long Maoist insurgency. Maoists, more commonly referred to as Naxalites, often boycotted Indian elections, and targeted election officials and polling places with shootings and bombings. Meanwhile, a coalition of left-leaning parties had held power in the state for 30 years; that a coalition could hang on to power for so long provoked suspicion that the coalition parties were rigging the elections and that the commission was "merely applying its stamp of approval."
West Bengal's state assembly elections, scheduled for May 2006, offered an opportunity for a new approach to election management that could sway public opinion about the fairness of the electoral process. Sen and Balakrishna began to brainstorm "how to make it so that on the day of elections everything would be absolutely fair and proper -- [and also] appear to be fair and proper," The two men drew up a strategy paper that, among other things, proposed that members of India's Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) be assigned to each of the 45,000 designated polling places. Typically, states never received enough CRPF personnel to cover every polling place because the agency needed to cover the whole country. But because states scheduled elections for their own legislatures at varying times, Sen was granted his full request.
As election day neared, and with CRPF police at each polling station, Sen and Balakrishna deployed the state police to detain people with existing arrest warrants. They also brought in observers from outside the state to monitor voting.
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