It takes time for six hundred million voters to go to the polls. For the recent national poll, the Indian Election Commission set up a voting schedule which stretched over a full month, allowing an army of election officials to travel from region to region to set up and monitor the process. Delhi voted on September 5th; the state of Uttar Pradesh, with a voting population one-third that of the United States, voted on three days in September separated by a week each. Four other large states voted on three separate polling days with the last vote taken on October 3rd . The whole process culminated on October 7th when the results were announced.

Democracy in any country is expensive. In India preliminary estimates set the figure for this election at seven billion rupees ($161 million), and this time there was a good deal of resentment at the frequency with which the whole country has had to be mobilized to settle what seems more like a squabble among politicians than a referral of major issues to the voters. And this time the results promised to be little different from the election held a year before. Three national elections in four years seems excessive. Nevertheless, the Westminster system, which India adopted from its former British rulers, requires a national poll when the government fails to retain its majority in Parliament. So when Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, forced a vote of confidence, brought down the coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and then failed to secure a majority for a Congress-led government, the constitution required a nation-wide vote for a new Parliament or Lok Sabha.

To a visitor from the United States the process itself is mind boggling. It seems a wonder that democracy in a country of this size with a large illiterate population, and few modern conveniences works at all. Yet it does-and has for over fifty years since independence. Experts have been predicting the failure of Indian democracy since its birth, but it persists and yields electoral results that are accepted as valid. India has developed a deep-rooted democratic political culture of its own, and an outsider can only observe and wonder.

The Congress Party candidate running for a constituency containing the city of Agra said that if he could garner 200,000 votes of the 1.3 million eligible voters he would win in a four-way contest. He would not have a majority of the vote, but a plurality was all that was needed. His appeal was to old-time Congress loyalists and to lower class voters who had deserted the Congress in recent years in favor of several regional parties. He was explaining all of this in well cultivated English to a group of American students who had been invited to attend a Congress rally in a Dalit (untouchable) district of Agra. That is the way candidates get their message to voters in urban areas. They go all day long from neighborhood rally to neighborhood rally in their district where hopefully the advance men in sound trucks have conjured up a crowd, or potential voters have been given a small sum to attend. Voters who can read find out about candidates from the newspapers, and the national television channel carries free spots for major candidates, but campaigning in India remains remarkably face to face.

The challenge of gaining the voters' attention is even greater in rural districts which may stretch over very large areas of nearly impassable terrain. Here, for instance, in the Garwal district of northern Uttar Pradesh, election officials and candidates had to travel over twisting roads--some paved, some not-to remote small towns and villages perched on steep hillsides. Think of the Cascade Range doubled in height and stretched north over 50 miles to the permanent snows of the Himalayas with tiny villages scattered throughout. That is a single constituency with a population of over one million. Yet the candidates and party representatives do reach these isolated voters who in their turn walk miles to cast their votes on polling day.

The 1999 elections to the Lok Sabha (Peoples Assembly) were held under the supervision of an unusually vigilant Election Commission, a bipartisan body set up in Delhi. This year the Commission banned all paid TV advertising. The Supreme Court even took the extraordinary step of disenfranchising from both candidacy and the vote the Shiv Sena boss, Bal Thackery. His transgression was to have made inflammatory remarks pitting castes and religious groups against each other. Many municipal corporations have banned posters and sign painting on walls. Given the month-long duration of polling, the Election Commission issued a ban on the publication of all exit polls until the process was complete. In this they were overruled by the Supreme Court. All of these regulations are no doubt motivated by a desire to tone down the enthusiasm which can result in violent clashes, but the result is to remove some of the most colorful aspects from campaigning and to contribute to what has been a lackluster campaign and a lower voter turnout than usual. Still, approximately 60 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballots.

Regulations spare Indian political parties some of the cost of campaigning-particularly the cost of paying for expensive air time. Yet money still fuels the process, and only the major parties have enough to fly prominent political figures and glamorous movie stars to swing constituencies and mount large-scale rallies. The money comes from the usual suspects-industrialists and local middle-class contributors interested in currying favor with successful candidates. To an American sensitized to the issue of campaign financing, it is interesting to note that here the common complaint about the corrupting influence of money is centered more on the behavior of officials once elected than on the process of gaining office. It also helps that the campaigning season is short-really only a few weeks between the calling of an election and the polling dates. To this observer this seems a mercy.

What most frequently makes it into foreign press coverage of Indian elections is news of violence or corruption-and there is plenty of both. Indian elections have always been rather unruly affairs, punctuated by murders of opposition candidates and deaths from clumsy efforts at police control of over-enthusiastic crowds. Despite stepped up efforts of the Election Commission to regulate the process and efforts of state, federal and regional police, there has been some violence this time around. In the particularly lawless state of Bihar 33 people, including 29 security personnel and two polling staff, were killed by armed insurgents who were trying to force a boycott of the elections. A BJP candidate and two aids were killed in a bomb blast in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and another BJP candidate was murdered in Assam. On the final day of polling, another 30 people were killed in the tribal states of the northeastern part of the country where armed insurgents are still at large. But stiff security measures kept things peaceful in almost all constituencies. In the northern town of Dehra Dun, for example, the security authorities deployed six companies of paramilitary forces, 3000 Civil Police and about 2,500 members of the Home Guard to police 472 polling places. Local authorities required 50,000 rupee surities days before the polling from about 5,500 people suspected as troublemakers, and the district Magistrate issued shoot-on-sight orders for anyone attempting to snatch ballot papers or run away with ballot boxes. But there was no violence or disruption in Dehra Dun. It seems that in this election almost all of the violence was caused by armed insurgents rather than being the result of political rivalries.

Things were quiet and orderly at the polling places we observed in Mussoorie. Shops along the narrow hilly streets were ordered closed so that no employee was prevented from voting. Consequently the streets seemed to have widened. A wonderful mix of people strolled to and from the polling stations. One noticed first that women were present in the streets in near their proportional number. An elderly man was assisted by his son up the stairs to the polling place; middle class men and women in their polyester pants and boldly colored saris looked as if they had dressed up for the occasion; tribal women joined their menfolk from the nearby villages-the milk wallahs (men who carry milk cans on their backs up the steep hills from the village), construction workers and porters who made this hill community function. The first to arrive at the polling places were the lower castes and the Muslim minority. Their vote was valuable to them, and they came early in large numbers together to avoid intimidation. First they gathered at tables set up in the streets by party workers and tried to find their names on the voting register. The party workers used to give them a piece of paper with their number and instructions on how to vote, but for this election they had only to find their number and head to the official voting list at the polling place past the armed guards. All was quiet and orderly. The polling place itself looked familiar to an American-workers behind the register finding names, handing out and stamping a ballot, the curtained booth and the ballot box with a slit for the ballot paper.

When a voter left the polling station, his or her hand was stamped with indelible ink in an attempt to assure one person, one vote. This last measure didn't always work. Several young men boasted to us that they had managed to vote more than once.

Still order was maintained in the vast majority of the 800,000 polling stations throughout the country. In some areas there was voter intimidation keeping groups of voters from the polls, or booth capturing when local partisans gained control of the polling place from the security forces (or in collusion with the security forces). In 481 constituencies in Bihar the Election Commission invalidated the vote because of booth capturing and voter intimidation. The voting in these constituencies was held a second time under tighter security-one of the advantages of a voting process extended over a month.

Ballots were not counted at the individual polling places. Instead metal ballot boxes were wrapped in burlap, sealed and sent under armed guard to 1,500 central counting centers. A few areas had installed electronic voting machines, but these were in a distinct minority. Counting was accomplished in two days with the results trickling in from individual constituencies. At this point the process became very familiar with television commentators announcing results, analyzing why one party or candidate fared better or worse than the polls had predicted. "Our" constituency in Mussoorie was a cliff-hanger. Eventually the BJP candidate was declared the winner-the same as a year before. The Congress candidate in Agra who needed 200,000 votes to win, was edged out by the Samajwadi Party candidate, a defeat for the BJP as well as Congress. These results reflected the overall trend which was an increased majority for the BJP coalition with a few gains by Congress in its old stronghold of Uttar Pradesh. The Indian democracy had spoken.