This column is and is not about the Special Intensive Revision of voters’ rolls, especially in Bengal. It’s about a deeper underlying issue.
Five states and a Union territory are going to the polls. Voters’ rolls are being revised in all of them. Only in Bengal is the exercise leading to deepening levels of discontent, frustration and protest.
There are two reasons for this. First, the Bengal SIR has adopted special practices. The most unpopular, because the most taxing for the lakhs of people affected, is the probing of alleged ‘logical discrepancies’ in the data with unique intensity. This exercise, introduced belatedly, has more than doubled the number of cases under scrutiny. It will be touch and go to examine them all before the voters’ rolls close. Those who don’t make it will almost certainly not have the time to appeal to a tribunal.
There is a second reason as well. The Union government and ruling party have decreed that India’s biggest challenge is illegal immigration. Even the prime minister raised the issue in his Independence Day address. Inevitably, the chief target of suspicion is a particular state and community that shares a border and a language with Bangladesh. It is unquestionably a porous border, though the number of infiltrators might be greatly inflated. In fact, there are no reliable numbers. Unrelenting propaganda, speculation and hate speech have branded every Bengali speaker in India as a possible ghuspaithiya, even if they have lived here for generations and have documents to prove it. Across India, West Bengal’s inhabitants have been lynched by vigilantes, detained by the police, and even pushed across the border into Bangladesh under cover of night.
Hence every resident of West Bengal is hyper-anxious for inclusion in the voters’ list: failure to do so might jeopardize their citizenship. This involves moving heaven and earth to acquire one or more of a limited set of documents. In other states, the privileged classes have not faced this problem on any scale. The humbler orders may have done, but their voices (if raised at all) have been ignored or suppressed. Hence there is no awareness that Bengal’s problem today might afflict another state tomorrow. The example of Assam has gone unheeded, so alien does the Northeast feel to ‘mainland’ Indians.
The rationale of the current SIR is the reverse of all previous ones. Earlier revisions had taken the then current list as its basis, retaining the names unless there was clear cause for removal. The supporting documents may not have stood up to fastidious scrutiny, but their very existence was prima facie evidence of the holder’s citizenship. It was for the State to prove the contrary.
This time the burden of proof is on the citizen. At the very start, all residents had their voting rights, hence implicitly their citizenship, effectively placed in suspension. They might have been born here, lived here all their lives, studied here, worked here, married and raised families, inherited property. They might possess a battery of documents testifying to these facts, but only a random assortment will serve. These exclude the voter’s identity card issued by the Election Commission itself. Even documents formally approved (like a passport) may not always work; nor a link with the 2002 voters’ roll, announced as the control document.
But the basic issue lies deeper. Why, after living out our lives here, should we need to apply for voting rights — effectively, for citizenship — all over again? The form we signed reads “I am applying...” We apply only for what we do not have; and applications can be either granted or refused. Neither condition applies to the voting right of persons who have voted earlier (witness the 2002 rolls); or, in the EC’s own phrase, who can be “mapped” against such persons; or indeed, submit stand-alone credentials. The two latter categories may have to “apply for inclusion” as a formality, for the State cannot otherwise know of them. But they cannot be subjected to an inquisition, or their cases dismissed because their lives do not, in retrospect, fit a randomly designed form.
Some people become citizens of a country where they were not born by applying in the true sense (that is, with a risk of refusal) and meeting various conditions. They are called naturalized citizens. Most other people are natural-born citizens. Their citizenship derives from the circumstance of their birth and, in most cases, their life in that country. Along the way, they pick up certain documents, though India’s more deprived citizens acquire sadly few. In any event, their citizenship is an integral factor of their lives, and the State should respect that identity.
Instead, we are finding, in fact if not in principle, that our identity as citizens rests upon an external decision by the State, based on an arbitrary selection of documents, arbitrarily interpreted. Our citizenship is no longer something we possess by the terms of our being, but something the State grants us — or not. It is a gift, not a right.
Our relationship with the State is thus stood on its head. We no longer form the State, or determine how it will be formed, which is the whole point of democratic elections. Paradoxically, today the very electoral process is placing us at the mercy of the State to determine whether we can belong to it — in other words, whether we can vote. State functionaries are selecting the voters, not the voters the functionaries.
The phrase ‘democratic elections’ appears tautological. But today it is a commonplace that the world is filling up with electoral dictatorships, where elections are held but the whim of the rulers prevails over the will of the people, not the other way about. India is still far from being a dictatorship, despite its increasing features of authoritarian rule. Independent India has a robust history of citizens exercising their electoral strength, empowered by a proactive EC. We can only hope the tradition reasserts itself over the next month.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University