Once upon a time, rigging elections was the pure art of impersonation. That’s when southern states, which didn’t measure up to some of their northern counterparts in terms of violence and booth capturing, did well in the art of peaceful rigging.

Tamil Nadu can be credited with virtually institutionalising cash-for-votes, but Kerala mostly stuck to the old tactics of casting votes of those who were unable or unwilling to exercise their franchise. For this, the communists and the Congressmen in Kerala ran exclusive ‘R’ rooms (war rooms specialising in rigging). The comrades excelled in this, prompting former chief election commissioner T N Seshan to call the CPM “practitioners of ‘rig’ veda”.

The parties’ squads would do multiple rounds of enumeration to ascertain who all are unlikely to vote. This list is then handed over to the ‘R’ room to ready voter slips and impersonators. A hit rate of 30% was big. Anything below 10% would be analysed by the party’s local committee as a failure. Dravidian parties, too, did this, with less finesse.

In the fine art of removing the ‘indelible ink’, the communists, who had an army of women impersonators, won hands down. On election day, ‘R’ rooms would open branches near select polling booths, often in the house of a party member or a sympathiser. The toolkit was simple: a bottle of diluted acid, stalks of breadfruit tree leaves, a bottle of spirit and some cotton.

The designated women would go to the polling booths with generous amounts of coconut oil on their hair. As soon as the ‘indelible ink’ is applied, they, as if brushing away a lock of hair that had fallen on the forehead, would wipe the finger on the oil-smeared hair, cast their vote, and rush to the ‘R’ room where comrades waited with breadfruit stalks dipped in acid. Swish went the stalk over the finger, and a dab of cotton dipped in spirit wiped it clean. Presto! She was ready for another vote, in another booth.

I was still in awe of the ‘R’ rooms when I moved to Andhra Pradesh as a reporter. What awaited me in the 1996 Lok Sabha election in Nandyal, where then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao was fighting TDP candidate Bhuma Nagi Reddy, was a much cruder yet more effective method of rigging.

The Rayalaseema warlords came in those boxy vehicles called Trekker. A few would have sling bags on their shoulder, a hand nursing the country bombs inside; others had bottles of ink. At booths where a rival candidate was understood to have polled more votes, they poured ink into the ballot boxes; where the race was neck and neck, they took bunches of ballot papers from frightened – or willing – polling officers, stamped them and stuffed them into the boxes.

It was surprisingly peaceful. Later I realised that both the Congress and the TDP had hired faction leaders who operated in their respective areas without mutual incursions. The one with more fiefdoms scored more. Narasimha Rao won the election with a majority of almost a lakh votes.

Cash-for-votes has robbed elections of all such ingenuities, though the methods in which TN parties do that merit an IIM study. In Tamil Nadu, the first allegations of largescale voter bribing came against the AIADMK, in the 2003 Sathankulam byelection. The DMK is credited with finetuning it in the Thirumangalam byelection in 2009. T T V Dhinakaran hasn’t done much — the 2017 byelection in R K Nagar was but an improvement over the Thirumangalam formula.

Electoral IDs, EVMs and VVPATs promise to make elections fairer. But when the Election Commission of India announces general elections this month, faction leaders will service their SUVs, comrades will aim their sickles at breadfruit leaves and Mahatma Gandhi will continue to smile from Rs 2000 notes.