Did Mumbai pass the voter turnout test? Experts discuss

The Mumbai Metropolitan region — all of Mumbai city and Thane — went to the polls today in the third and last phase of polling for the state of Maharashtra. Voters in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, were expected to stand up and be counted.

Mumbai’s electorate was expected to shrug off its infamous apathy and participate in the process of the government election, more so after the experience of the terror attacks last November. So, we ask, Did Mumbai deliver?

B Venkatesh Kumar, political scientist from Mumbai University; Madhav Bhatkuly, Director, New Horizon Investment, also on the managing committee of Empowered Mumbai; Vivek Gilani, founder of mumbaivotes.com; and Meera Sanyal, ABN AMRO chief and independent candidate who contested the elections from Mumbai South constituency, confer to discuss.

Kumar said he was disappointed at the low voter turnout in Mumbai, especially after the buzz that was created post the November 26 attacks.

“The sheer numbers do disappoint you when you look at them just cursorily. But it is quite encouraging that out of how many ever lakhs that did end up voting this time a lot of them went to the voting booth with information, empowered, rather than just going there and throwing a dart in the dark and walking out,” Gilani said. “So, qualitatively I am very assured that we moved positively in a direction.”

Sanyal said the overall voter turnout was low but South Mumbai fared well. “I am still struggling for the numbers of South Mumbai, if they are 43% then it’s considerably higher than what South Mumbai recorded last time which was around 30%, we are not counting for the de-limitation but South Mumbai in itself, this is certainly better than what we had the last time.”

Here is a verbatim transcript of their exclusive interview on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: 43% [turnout] is low compared to what we did last time in 2004, which was 47%. How do you judge whether it is a good turnout or a bad turnout? How disappointed should we be?

B Venkatesh Kumar: I think the voter turnout has been very disappointing. I would have expected that given a lot of noises about the number of voters being registered, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) taking a lot of steps in getting voters on board, I think the turnout today has been fairly disappointing.

Two possible reasons could be that maybe the voters feel that there has been a low electoral contestation, and there is also a decline of the competitive party system, which is the backbone of any democracy.

Q: Mumbai should have seen a bigger turnout especially after the terror attacks. South Mumbai is where the terror attacks happened. We see a 43% turnout over there, which mirrors the Mumbai average. Why did we not see a better turnout?

Madhav Bhatkuly: The world average for voter turnouts is 64%. Is India very far away from it? Actually, no. Look at India immediately after independence. The first-ever election was south of 60%. There were three major spikes in voter turnout on a national level, which was 1977 — post emergency when Janata Party came into power. The second one was when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi came into power and then 1998 was the biggest voter turnout when people were just fed up with several governments preceding Atal Bihari Vajpayee and voted him into power.

In this particular election, you could argue that 26/11 was an event or. It was certainly for some individuals. But this wasn’t something clearly that engaged the nation.

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