Swamped by stickers and billboards

EVERY house in the neighbourhood had stickers on boundary walls. Then there were billboards of various sizes on electricity poles, electricity transformer enclosures and even trees. Wherever one looked, the smiling image of the candidate was staring at you. This was, after all, the poll season, and all is fair in love and elections.

The best part was that the candidates had not yet been announced. All this was so-called advance publicity, which obviously did not come under the expenditure limit fixed by the Election Commission of India (ECI). And so, for the previous six months or so, the ticket hopefuls were making sure that their beatific faces were recognised by all. Of course, this was only part of the strategy — they were also sponsoring religious discourses, organising caste-specific meetings and making your presence felt at all social gatherings.

One of the hopefuls, a wealthy businessman, was way ahead of the others when it came to plastering his face all over the town. Initially, the sight of the bearded contender was annoying, but soon one got used to seeing his image everywhere. The stickers, though, got my goat. And so, I did my bit as a responsible citizen and decided to take action against this blatant violation of the model code of conduct. I had read in newspapers about the ECI’s cVIGIL app, which allowed vigilant citizens to report such violations. The app claimed that the issue would be resolved in less than an hour — 15 minutes for the field team to arrive at the site, 30 minutes to execute the action and report and 50 minutes to close the complaint. All this sounded too good to be true.

The other day, during my morning walk, I took photographs of a sticker on a house as well as billboards on an electric pole near my house and lodged complaints on the app, which captured the location automatically.

Amazingly, I soon got a message saying that my complaint had been verified. This didn’t seem possible since I had not seen anyone come and check the site where the violation had taken place. But then, no one said that advertisements have to be true!

However, after about two hours, I received a message saying that my complaint has been resolved. I went out and saw some officials come and scrape off the sticker as well as take down the billboards from the pole. The speed at which the complaint had been addressed was very impressive. There was one small thing, though — right next to the sticker and the billboards whose pictures I had uploaded, there were many more stickers and billboards. But these were not touched! Clearly, the field team’s remit only extended to the actual complaint and not to other violations close by, even if they loomed large over the observer.

I have two options now — I can upload photos of all the billboards, which will take me five years! Or I could continue to look at the airbrushed visage of the prospective candidate smiling at me, as if he is saying, ‘Look who had the last laugh!’