“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” — Abraham Lincoln
Would the 16th president of the United States of America have reposed his faith in the strength of the ballot over the destructive power of the bullet — symbolising fear — if he were observing the just-concluded assembly election in Bengal?
The question is not being asked in mirth, or as idle speculation. Lincoln’s rousing proclamation about the ballot can be interpreted as an invocation of the robustness of elections, one of democracy’s Tebbit tests, against dread. Yet, this year’s canvassing for the Bengal election was unprecedented in one aspect: it bore proof of barely-disguised attempts across political lines to weaponise fear as a form of potent electoral capital in a bid to influence voters’ opinion.
The advertisements that the Bharatiya Janata Party flooded the front pages of dailies with pivoted around the idea of fear. Pledging faith over fear — “bhoy noy bhorosa” — these advertisements provided a long list of the Trinamool Congress’s alleged failures and fear-mongering. The BJP pointed fingers at Bengal’s ruling party’s neglect of farmers, tea gardens, industries, and business, its endorsement of a template of hegemony crafted on violence — an inheritance from the erstwhile Left Front regime — its tending to the cottage industry of corruption, as well as glaring failures to ensure women’s safety and dignity. Not all of these charges are figments of a rival’s febrile imagination; neither does the fear that the BJP sought to invoke take the form of explicit violence on all occasions. Families with allegiance to Opposition parties in rural Bengal and urban hinterlands often whisper about the politically-orchestrated punishment of the ‘social boycott’, a seemingly non-violent but brutal mechanism meant to alienate rivals from the larger community and constrict their access to means
of subsistence.
The TMC responded to the BJP’s stoking of fear of its regime with its own enumeration of the reasons to fear its principal electoral adversary. There was, for instance, the charge of the BJP’s intention of intruding into and corroding Bengal’s at least superficially inclusive cultural ethos with the practice of shrill puritanism. One of The Telegraph’s reporters, who has been on the poll beat across districts, recounted an illuminating example of this whisper campaign. In Purulia, a young woman hailing from a family of BJP supporters was circumspect about voting for the party this time. The reason? She was anxious that her staple of fish and meat would be frowned upon in New Bengal, just as it is in many an Indian state under the BJP’s thumb. That the BJP had to make its leaders eat fish — quite literally — in public underlined the deepening imprint of such an apprehension in the people’s mind. Again, the BJP’s pledge to bring the Uniform Civil Code similarly alarmed not only large segments of Bengal’s minorities but also liberal Hindus mindful of that party’s assaults on the republic’s fraying pluralist framework as well as of the State’s renewed capacity to undermine privacy, individual liberties and agency under the bogey of women’s welfare — the contours of the UCC in Uttarakhand that the BJP championed augmented this anxiety further.
But what has been the most effective factor in puncturing bhorosa’s triumph over bhoy was the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bengal that has had peculiarities not to be found in other states. One such feature has been the sieve of ‘logical discrepancy’ that has been wielded disproportionately by the Electoral Commission of India — now synonymous, the cynic argues, with the BJP — to weed out voters from Bengal’s electoral list. Partha Chatterjee has described this malady succinctly in a recent article in The Wire.
“Logical discrepancy is a malady that seems to have afflicted some of the highest echelons of the Indian state… The term ‘logical discrepancy’ was invented by the Election Commission this time specifically for the revision exercise in West Bengal. It was not used in the recent SIR process in Bihar or Gujarat... or indeed ever before in the history of Indian elections… The true import of the term ‘logical discrepancy’ was discovered when the final list of eligible voters was published… It now transpires that a large number of those who were found ineligible fell into the logical discrepancy trap…”
Chatterjee’s usage of the word, ‘trap’, is deliberate and justified. The rationale for such ‘illogical discrepancies’ — mismatch of an elector’s name in the current rolls with the rolls prepared after the last intensive revision (“there is no standard form of transcribing Bengali or Arabic-Persian names into Roman script. The same name can easily appear in different spellings”, writes Chatterjee); an age gap of less than 15 years or more than 50 years between electors and their parents; six or more electors mapped as progeny of one person and so on — has been spiritedly refuted by many of those who have been pushed out of the voters’ list. Worse, as pointed out by the former chief election commissioner, Ashok Lavasa, most of the disenfranchised electors were not given an opportunity to prove their case in time.
The BJP has been vocal in its support for the EC, the SIR and the latter’s demonstrable excesses despite the entrenched anxiety and sense of humiliation among the SIR’s victims. This made it vulnerable to the TMC’s allegations — real or imagined — that the SIR is a prelude to further institutional predations on constitutional rights under its watch. This message — of Bengal’s dystopian future under the BJP — was even disseminated by using AI technology by the TMC. The unexpectedly high turnout among voters in the first phase of the elections can be attributed to this fanning of subterranean anxiety.
The liberal editorial classes — a much-maligned and depleted force — may object to this cynical utilisation of fear as electoral capital by contestants in a democracy. But the truth is that modern democracies are heavily reliant on trepidation to pass the electoral test. The ascendancy of the far-Right in numerous democracies, from Europe to the Americas to Asia in recent decades, has been predicated on the politics of panic, with migrants, Muslims, liberals and sexual minorities, among other social constituencies, transformed into fodder for loathing and alarm.
Interestingly, as the scholar, John Keane, suggests in his instructive examination of the relationship between democracy and fear, modern democracy was imagined to have the capacity to sublimate fear, an element central to the sustenance of despotism and an unrestrained State that Montesquieu tore to shreds in De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws). Yet, it is evident that democracy’s relationship with fear has come full circle — but in reverse — with fear’s transformation into an electoral good in polities around the world. What has abetted this reversal is the parallel hollowing out of institutions that are, theoretically, democracy’s vanguard, the neutering of civil society as well as the media’s willing consumption and amplification of fear — rashes that are spreading on India’s body politic as well.
Bengal’s electoral outcome will be known in a few days. But what is already known is that this election in Bengal was a testament to bhorosa being outvoted by bhoy by the minders of democracy.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in