The massive democracy exercise that India undertakes twice a decade is once again leaving its mark on the people of the country, in the form of purple-striped index fingers.
The Electoral Commission uses indelible ink, or “voter ink”, to prevent fraud or duplicate votes. Once the voter arrives at the booth to vote and has their identity verified, paint is painted on the top of the left index finger, leaving a stain that can take up to two weeks to remove.
It may be rudimentary, but the method has been so effective that it has been around for more than seven decades.
“From the prime minister to the most common person, everyone gives the (marked) finger,” said K Mohammed Irfan, managing director of Mysore Varnish and Paints Limited (MVPL), the state-owned company that exclusively manufactures and distributes the liquid. to voting booths across the country.
“From celebrities to movie stars… (it has) become a brand of democracy that I consider synonymous with elections,” he told CNN in a video interview.
More than 960 million people can vote in Elections in India, the largest in the world. And workers at the company’s factory in Mysuru, a city in southwestern Karnataka state, spent months preparing about 2.7 million bottles of ink, its largest order to date.
The orange containers were filled and carefully packaged for distribution ahead of this year’s elections, which run and end on June 1st. Each vial contains enough liquid to mark approximately 700 voters.
The key to the paint’s literal staying power? A closely guarded formula that has remained unchanged since 1951. “Indelible ink serves no other purpose,” said Irfan. “We only manufacture the quantity needed.”
Although Irfan says the company is “obliged to secrecy” when it comes to the exact composition of the paint, it contains the chemical compound silver nitrate, which causes a purplish stain when it comes into contact with the skin and is exposed to sunlight.
A little bit at a time
When newly independent India held its first general elections in 1951 and 1952, organizers turned to the idea of using indelible ink to mark voters in an effort to ensure a fair vote.
“In a country where there was no systematic birth registration, no identity documents, and with millions of people on the move as refugees, the question of how to prevent identity forgery and double voting was a source of great concern,” said Ornit Shani , author of “How India became democratic: citizenship and the construction of the universal franchise”. Some authorities thought the method would take too long and complicate the voting process, according to Shani, but public opinion ultimately won out.
“Combined with the practice that all voters, regardless of their caste, class and religion, would remain in the same queue, (having to wait) for their turn to have their finger marked (before) voting, further contributed to making concrete and visible the core value of voting equality,” Shani said in an email to CNN. “One man, one woman, one vote.”
Lasting appeal
MVPL was founded as a paint supplier in 1937 by the then Maharaja or ruler of Mysore, Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, and maintains that part of its business.
According to Irfan, when the company does not produce paints, it supplies, among other products, paints for the public transport sector. The ink’s appeal has also gone beyond India’s borders. The company now supplies indelible ink to more than 35 countries, including Ghana, as of the late 1970s. However, Ghana’s electoral commission recently announced that it would phase out the use of indelible ink, opting instead for biometric verification methods .
But the use of the ink in India doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. For Mukulika Banerjee, associate professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, the practice of marking a body may not translate well in other cultures, but it works in India due to common cultural practices.
“People routinely have their hands decorated with henna, or women have their feet decorated in different colors,” Banerjee said in a telephone interview. “I would say that finger marking (semi-permanently) fits into this in a way that it might not in other contexts.”
She also pointed to an unintended effect of marking voters with paint: creating an environment of peer pressure.
Banerjee managed to find examples of this during her research on democracy and elections in West Bengal.
“The first thing people do on voting day is check each other’s fingers,” she said. “And if your left index finger doesn’t have the indelible mark on it, they’ll look at you and the first thing they’ll say is ‘Why didn’t you vote?’
“You can make excuses, but for the fifth time in a day, if someone asks you and it gets so annoying, it’s actually easier to vote than not vote.”
Peer pressure extends to movie stars and athletes, who are likely to post their ink-stained fingers to their millions of fans on social media.
“These guys started holding up (their fingers) and taking selfies of having voted and saying ‘I voted, what about you?’ because they feel they have a civic duty to encourage others to vote too,” she added. “So it becomes an aspiration; so you want to be like your hero and be able to do the same thing.
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