To vote or declare you are not voting?

Ram Gopal Sharma doesn8217;t know what the Election Commission8217;s Manual of Election Law looks like.

Rule 49-O, framed in 1961, gives you the right not to vote, but few know about it

Ram Gopal Sharma doesn8217;t know what the Election Commission8217;s Manual of Election Law looks like. So he has never had to turn to Page 72, where, at the bottom, is an innocuous detail that goes by the name 490.

But as he walked up to the polling booth on Saturday morning, he ran the rule over in his head: walk up to the presiding officer, sign the register, ask for Form 49A and say he would like to vote for: nobody. That8217;s what Rule 490 does-the closest Indian voters can get to negative voting.

According to the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961, an elector can refuse to vote after he has been identified and necessary entries made in the register of electors. The EC has no data on the number of people who have used the rule because these 8220;votes8221; are not counted and there have only been stray incidents of activism so far. But those who believe in the Rule say 490 gives people a powerful right: to say 8216;No8217; without boycotting the democratic process. They hope, at least theoretically, that with better awareness among voters, 490 will force political parties to put up better candidates.

According to the Election Commission, barely 2 to 3 voters used Rule 490 to not vote in favour of any candidate in the Delhi assembly elections. The Youth for Equality, conducted an online awareness campaign to 8220;rid the system of bad roads, corrupt politicians and unfair reservation8221;.

All of that by not voting? Isn8217;t that taking utopia to the polling booth?

But VS Sreedhara, who voted under the Rule in the recent Karnataka assembly elections, is willing to believe in, what he calls a hypothesis: 8220;Someday, if the people who turn out not to vote are more than the number of votes a winning candidate gets, if not anything else, it will serve to embarrass the winning candidate.8221;

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But Prof Jagdeep Chokkar of the Association for Democratic Reforms, whose organisation has been pushing for electoral reforms, thinks there should be better and easier ways to express dissent 8212; maybe a 8220;None of the above NOTA8221; option on the EVM or a winning limit of 8220;50 per cent plus one8221; votes. 8220;Rule 490 is self-defeating because the person who uses it has to be so motivated as to stand in a line, wait for his turn and then say he is not voting.8221;