'Tamil Nadu voters complicit in bribery fiasco'

Former chief election commissioner N Gopalaswami says the EC would have to bring in a 5,000-strong team of observers to tackle voter bribing in RK Nagar, a move that would only bring more shame to the state. Leading political parties have "a systematic way" of bribing voters, but voters are also complicit, he said in an interview with Meera Vankipuram.Excerpts:
The EC sent a proposal to the Centre, recommending candidates chargesheeted for bribing voters be disqualified from contesting elections. Your view?
The Commission has been saying this for a long time. Political parties have not accepted it so far. The main ground is - what if the party in power makes up false cases against members of the opposition. The EC had answered it by saying don't consider any cases filed within six months prior to the election. There is an independent authority in the court. This is sufficient protection against false cases.
TN will probably go down in history as a state that set an ugly precedent of rampant voter bribing. Have you seen such a scale of corruption in any other state?
I haven't seen anything of this kind. From election to election, it has been refined in Tamil Nadu. It used to be money under the morning newspapers. Now there are coupons, top up of mobiles, direct payment to wherever you have mortgaged your jewellery or other materials, ingenious method of not paying you within the constituency but outside.
Why is it so difficult for the EC to check corruption even for a byelection, with all the resources at its disposal?
Normally, in a constituency with 2,50,000 voters, the Commission has only three to five observers. This time in R K Nagar constituency, they brought in 270 observers. If the political parties can have one contact person for bribing 50 voters, in R K Nagar you should have 5,000 observers. If we have not already been shamed enough, I don't know if we are waiting for a 5,000-strong EC observer team to come for us to be shamed more.
What would be your suggestions to check corruption in an election?
Over the years, the spending of the state on developmental activity has enormously gone up. Every such thing is being viewed as an opportunity to knock out money. So it is the opportunity to make illegal wealth being in seats of power which is the driving force. Unless you can stop that, you are not going to stop bribery.
The R K Nagar byelection was a huge fiasco. Voters too joined in to make it conducive for parties to distribute money, didn't they?
I don't want to blame everybody in TN, but the received wisdom today is that the TN voter expects money to vote. The two major parties in TN which started bribery in a very systematic way have really brought tremendous shame on this state. In the entire country, if you talk about voter bribery, nobody will recall any state except Tamil Nadu.