In 1903, the United States of America’s Supreme Court delivered a devastating blow to the promise of inclusive democracy in the post-Reconstruction American South in a landmark case known as Giles vs Harris. The petitioner, Jackson W. Giles, a Black educator and longtime registered voter in Alabama, was barred from re-registering under the state’s new 1901 Constitution, a document crafted to crush the threat of expanded Black suffrage. Although Giles and other African-Americans arrived well before the deadline, White registrars had refused to process their applications. Yet the court upheld the denial of his voting rights, ruling that it lacked the power to compel state officials to provide relief.
In effect, the decision amounted to a judicial green light that legitimised a raft of discriminatory electoral laws that were used as tools of systemic disenfranchisement. These Jim Crow-era voting regulations, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and arbitrary registration schemes, succeeded in their aim of stripping the majority of Black citizens in the South of a political voice for nearly two generations.
India’s Supreme Court is presently hearing a voting rights case of comparable import for the future of Indian democracy. The case pertains to petitions challenging the Special Intensive Revision exercise undertaken by the Election Commission of India in Bihar ahead of the 2025 assembly elections. Petitioners, including civil society activists and several Opposition leaders, stress the onerous documentary requirements and complicated process of registration, the unprecedented shifting of onus on the voter to prove his/her identity, and the arbitrary deletion of around 65 lakh voters without due process. In its interim direction, the Supreme Court heeded the petitioners and ordered district-wise, booth-level publication of omitted names and the reasons for omission, to be searchable online and displayed publicly, and allowed challenges for inclusion supported by the Aadhaar card or the Electoral Photo Identity Card.
These directions constitute an important pushback against the SIR process, which ought to be seen as not just a procedural refinement but an attempt to bring about a paradigmatic shift in the electoral rules of the game. The shape of this prospective paradigm of voting bears an unsettling resonance with the political logic of Jim
Crow voting regulations in three fundamental aspects.
The first aspect lies in the exclusionary logic of the SIR’s political framing, which clearly targets a minority segment that is deemed problematic to the interests of the regime. Leaders of the ruling National Democratic Alliance have presented the SIR as a necessary safeguard against the spectre of ‘illegal immigrants’ — in practice, a thinly-coded reference to Muslims — reinforced by a steady stream of media reports citing unnamed EC sources. In West Bengal, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s leader of the Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari, has called for the measure’s adoption, invoking the alleged presence of “nearly one crore Rohingya immigrants, Bangladeshi Muslim voters”. Given that Adhikari has previously threatened to “throw the Muslim MLAs outside the Assembly premises” if the BJP were to come to power, one may reasonably infer whom he really wants to exclude from the political process (unless being an MLA is also no longer considered proof of Indian citizenship).
The second aspect relates to the manipulation of the ‘electoral rules of the game’ such that the act of voting becomes a matter of privilege, conferred by the grace of the bureaucracy or the ruling party rather than a matter of right guaranteed by the constitutional settlement. Much like under the Jim Crow system, the formal bureaucratic regulations have been designed to be so onerous that poorer and less educated voters come to depend upon political patronage or official indulgence for the exercise of their voting right. Poor White voters in the American South also found it difficult to comply with literacy requirements and poll taxes but they could always look up to the patrons in the Democratic Party to help them across the regulatory obstacles. This fed into larger relationships of dependence which fused non-elite White voters with the Southern Democrats’ political machine. Similarly, the regulatory barrier placed before voters in Bihar becomes steeper the lower they find themselves in the caste and class ladder. In the manner of the Democratic Party machine in the American South, the NDA party machine can be expected to employ its influence over state authorities to carry its presumed non-elite Hindu base across the regulatory maze.
Yet, the forms of patron-client linkages bred by these arbitrary demands must be seen in terms of the wider political settlement between the Narendra Modi regime and non-elite voters. This constitutes the third aspect of the prospective voter paradigm with troubling resonances to the Jim Crow regime. One must remember that the institution of voting in every country tends to reflect the features of the wider political settlement that structures the governing political order. What is meant here by political settlement? We can adapt from the work of the political theorist, Edward Laws, in defining a political settlement as a two-level negotiated relationship: one, between ruling political elites and dominant social and economic elites; and, two, between political elites and their followers. It is the pattern of this underlying political settlement which becomes embedded in governing institutions. These institutions, in turn, come to regulate the distribution of public goods and power networks in ways that reinforce the terms of the political settlement.
Much like the Jim Crow regime, the Modi government rests on a political settlement that has concentrated the power of social and economic elites to the detriment of non-elite constituencies — constituencies that are then drawn back into the system through a blend of patronage networks and cultural persuasion. In both cases, the governing bargain is not merely a matter of policies but a deep architecture of power, binding elite interests together while setting (restricted) terms for how the majority experiences citizenship.
In the post-Reconstruction South, Southern Democrats consolidated a White-supremacist order in which planter and industrialist elites forged a dominant coalition. Jim Crow was not just a web of discriminatory laws; it was a political economy framework in which legalised segregation and repressed labour rights coalesced to discipline both African-Americans and poor Whites into low-wage dependency. This benefited extractive elites in the agri-business, timber, and mill sectors whose profits rested on cheap labour rather than innovation.
The Modi-era settlement mirrors this logic, notably in the fomenting of State-backed rent-seeking opportunities for politically aligned corporate tycoons. These corporate allies have expanded their grasp over rent-thick sectors like energy, infrastructure, and mining even as they tighten their stranglehold over cultural institutions like the mass media. On the flip side, the paradigm of welfare has been reconfigured from citizenship-based entitlements to benevolent cash transfers (‘Modi ki guarantee’), labour rights have been systematically eroded, the agriculture sector preserved in a ruinous cycle of low returns and debt traps, and public-sector reservations left to drift into irrelevance. The result is a surplus of cheap, mobile, demoralised labour ripe for exploitation by both upper-middle-class households and an extractive service-sector industry.
The role of State-sanctioned, racial/communal bigotry in these extractive political settlements is to act as a barrage against any potential upsurge of collective action of the marginalised. Any threat to the political settlement is met by renewed bouts of hate speech and violence. Thus, the corporate lobbyist, Vance Muse, warned that unionising would force White workers into alliance “with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs”. Or take the prime minister’s admonishment of poorer voters to not fall for Opposition-led calls for redistribution unless they wanted their land and gold to be taken away and distributed to infiltrators whom he specifically identified as Muslims.
A common thread running through both these political settlements is the entrenchment and the legitimisation of ‘extractive institutions’, which function to limit the participation of the broad swathe of society in a range of economic and political activities, particularly at the commanding levels. A 2020 World Economic Forum survey of 82 countries had ranked India among the bottom seven countries for “inter-generational upward mobility” flanked by Pakistan and Bangladesh. The racialised caste system of Jim Crow similarly throttled channels of upward mobility not just for Blacks but also for working-class Whites whose children “were forced to leave school when they were old enough to be employed”, as the historian, James Cobb, commented. The new voting regulations aim to extinguish the last inclusionary challenge to a political settlement engineered to sustain a perpetual race to the bottom among the “pitiable and oppressed”. That challenge is the guaranteed right to vote — its fading embers still casting a faint light on the liberatory promise of Indian democracy.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
