Time to let go of the election symbol

Should we not dispense with the election symbol altogether, and ask people to vote by pressing the button against the name of the candidate and the party.

The Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party have split into factions, and are fighting over which faction should get to retain the party’s election symbol. The Election Commission plays judge, and assigns the symbol to the faction it deems to represent the mother party better. Past experience suggests, with the Congress and the Janata Party, that the bigger judge, the voter, will have the final say.

But the real question is, should we not dispense with the election symbol altogether, and ask people to vote by pressing the button against the name of the candidate and the party he or she represents, rather than against an election symbol?

Diamonds, you might think, are forever. But not if the diamond in question is your election symbol. It might be yours today, but could be gone tomorrow, allotted to someone else or frozen by the Election Commission.

Election symbols range from the frying pan to the gas stove, the broom to the vacuum cleaner, a simple key to a pen drive, binoculars to bicycles. Collectively, they are a testament to the nation’s educational backwardness or, if you prefer, democratic advance that outstrips social development.

How It Started

At the time of the first general elections, spread out over four months from October 1951 to February 1952, held under the provisions of the freshly minted Constitution, India’s literacy rate was a little over 18 percent. Indian democracy started off with universal adult franchise. Anyone could vote, regardless of status with regard to educational attainment, gender, property ownership or social class.

But since over four-fifths of those eligible to vote could not read and write (if you can just read or write, but not both, the Census does not count you as literate), it was decided to allot candidates symbols, easily recognisable by those who support the candidates but could not read their names.

The election symbol of the biggest party, the Congress, was a yoked pair of bullocks. The Communists opted for the sickle and a sheaf of grain, sticking to the rural theme. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which later evolved into the BJP of today, was more urban in its support base, as compared to other major parties, and had a relatively urbane symbol, an oil lamp, of the kind from which Aladdin’s genie emerges, but with a flaming wick.

Many Symbols Came And Went

When the Congress split, the Organisation wing, led by Kamaraj, retained the party symbol. This should offer some comfort to Sharad Pawar, who has lost the NCP symbol to nephew Ajit Pawar’s faction. The Congress led by Indira Gandhi got, as its symbol, the cow and the calf, a symbol that simply begged to be traduced as the mother and the son, after Sanjay Gandhi’s emergence on the scene. Cartoonist Abu answered that call. After the Congress lost the 1977 general elections to the Janata Party, it fought the 1980 election with a new symbol, the Hand.

The Jana Sangh had merged into the Janata Party in 1977, and embraced the new party’s new symbol, a plough-bearing farmer. When the Socialist members of the Janata Party kicked up a fuss about some party members also being members of the RSS, the Jana Sangh group split away from the party, formed a new Bharatiya Janata Party and adopted its current symbol, the Lotus. A rump Janata Party retained the symbol.

Parties were assigned common symbols within a state or across the country, depending on their size and presence. Independents get symbols that do not belong to political parties. It is the proliferation of independents that accounts for the proliferation of election symbols. Of course, every party-less candidate in the country does not require a unique election symbol.

As in the case of FM radio, for which the same frequency can be used in different regions for different broadcasts by different operators and different languages, the salience of the symbol is limited to the constituency of the independent candidate. The same symbol can do service for another independent in another constituency.

Time To Bet On Literacy

Today, India’s literacy rate is close to 80 percent: We don’t know for sure because there has been no Census this decade on account of the pandemic. The literacy rate had already crossed 74 percent in 2011, and statistical projection and plain common sense both suggest that four-fifths of the population can read and write today.

If the symbol is dispensed with, party workers would race to educate illiterate voters how to read the names of their parties. Election campaigns would double up as adult literacy drives, albeit of a truncated kind. The more imaginative parties would deploy volunteers to wage full-fledged literacy campaigns, to win voter approval.

Let us shed this symbol of backwardness and put an end to squabbles over election symbols by abolishing election symbols altogether.

TK Arun is a senior journalist. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.