Hidden in Sikkim’s hills, a virtual constituency

Just where is the Sangha assembly constituency in Sikkim located? The state, with one Lok Sabha seat and 32 assembly seats, goes to the polls on Thursday, to elect both its new MP and a new assembly. But however closely you look at a map of the constituencies of Sikkim, you won’t find Sangha. It is the only assembly seat in the country that has no geographical location!

Updated on: Apr 29, 2009, 01:09:25 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Just where is the Sangha assembly constituency in Sikkim located?

The state, with one Lok Sabha seat and 32 assembly seats, goes to the polls on Thursday, to elect both its new MP and a new assembly. But however closely you look at a map of the constituencies of Sikkim, you won’t find Sangha. It is the only assembly seat in the country that has no geographical location!

How can that be?

Sangha is the constituency of all the Buddhist monks and nuns belonging to Sikkim, no matter where they reside in the state. They are all registered as voters of Sangha and not the area they live in.

“Sangha is not defined geographically,” said J.P. Prakash, newly appointed election commissioner. Around 75 per cent of Sikkim’s population comprises Nepalis, who are mostly Hindus.

The remaining 25 per cent, however, are Bhutias and Lepchas, primarily Buddhist. The monks and nuns from these communities have to frequently shift location from one monastery to another across the state. Instead of requiring them to register freshly at every new area they are sent to if they want to exercise their democratic right, they have all been made voters of Sangha!

Thus every polling booth in the state on Thursday will have three, not two electronic voting machines (EVMs). The first two are for the voters of that locality to elect their MP and their MLA.

The third EVM is kept for the exclusive use of the voters of Sangha – the monks and nuns who reside in that region. In this sparsely populated state – the 2001 census records just 5.4 lakh people – the average voter turnout at an assembly constituency in the 2004 assembly poll was between 5000 and 8000. In comparison, the turnout at Sangha – of 2088 voters – was respectable.

In the 2004 assembly polls, Sangha even saw the highest number of candidates among all Sikkim’s assembly seats – six. The Congress, the regional Sikkim Democratic Front and even the BJP, had put up their nominees alongside three independents.

It was the Congress candidate Tshering Lama who won, defeating his nearest rival, independent Palden Lama by 88 votes!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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