Being trolled by the State is an odd experience. We had the prime minister performatively dressed in saffron extolling the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as the world’s largest non-governmental organisation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day. This is probably true in a world where the Muslim Brotherhood technically qualifies as an NGO. We then had the petroleum ministry release a 15 August message which had V.D. Savarkar artfully raised above Mahatma Gandhi and Netaji Subhas Bose. This is the sangh’s version of ‘owning the libs’ because Savarkar was accused of being part of a conspiracy that led to Nathuram Godse’s assassination of Gandhi and then discharged on account of insufficient evidence.
The prime minister’s Red Fort performance is curious because it suggests that we are living in a fictional dystopia. Like something in the genre of The Plot Against America or The Man in the High Castle, where a far-Right figure becomes the US president or the Axis powers, having won World War II, divide America among themselves. The jarring thing about this reality show is that the props it uses are the same as the earlier version of the Republic — the Tricolour, the great Mughal symbol of the Red Fort and Rabindranath Tagore’s inclusive anthem — so the unsettling quality of the transformation is undermined by the old sets and special effects. What the prime minister needs is a brand-new backdrop. If he is trying to call the Hindu nation into being by playing a costumed Hindu ruler in his speeches, he needs an explicitly denominational setting.
On the other hand, there is a connection between the example of the State and the response of its more enthusiastic citizens. In my colony there was a flag hoisting organised on the morning of 15 August. It was a charming event, amusingly complicated by a recalcitrant, rolled-up flag that first refused to be tugged loose and then unfurled itself to applause and the rousing strains of the national anthem. In between the customary cries of “Vande Mataram” and “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, three middle-aged men shouted a new slogan, “Hindu dharam amar rahe”.
The prime minister wasn’t the only one conflating the rituals of nationhood with Hindu identity; his admirers in my neighbourhood were acting it out too. As I walked around, I saw houses flying the Tricolour and the triangular Hindu dhvaj together. This felt like the preliminary to a grander public double act. There was a time when Nepal, alone amongst nations, had a non-rectangular flag, the two-triangle standard marking its formal status as a Hindu kingdom. In this multi-season reality show in which we find ourselves, we’re all Nepalis now.
Except that these glimpses of this long-advertised Hindu rashtra are a kind of distraction. The real action lies not in the costumes and bunting that the stage managers of Hindutva want dissenting citizens to outrage about but in the changes to the basic workings of India’s democracy. The Election Commission’s opaque Special Intensive Revision of Bihar’s electoral roll before elections in the state later this year has produced a draft electoral roll that deletes six and a half million voters without publishing the reasons for their exclusion.
There are whole Scandinavian countries that don’t have six and a half million voters in all. To tell millions of poor, poorly connected and substantially illiterate people that their franchise has been cancelled just before an election without telling them why is a strange stance for a statutory body once admired for holding free and fair elections. The new arrangement by which the incumbent government has a majority in the panel that selects members of the Election Commission had already clouded the credibility of this crucial body. Poorly timed and rushed revisions, such as the one being conducted in Bihar that a priori exclude the two most common forms of identification in India, Aadhaar card and EPIC, thus excluding multitudes of voters, invite avoidable controversy.
Since the time of T.N. Seshan, the Election Commission has guarded its autonomy and its reputation for operational independence jealously. Elections came and went without the integrity of their processes being challenged. In recent years, the change in the way the multi-member EC is constituted and the tone of its responses to challenges by the Opposition have led to allegations of irregularity.
Sabyasachi Das, an economist at Ashoka University at the time, wrote a paper called “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy” which analysed the data on the 2019 election to argue that there was “… evidence consistent with voter manipulation at the stage of voter registration”. Das went on to level a more specific charge: “… the results point to strategic and targeted electoral discrimination against Muslims, in the form of deletion of names from voter lists…” Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has made a very public critique of the electoral rolls in Bengaluru, pointing to various irregularities, including a room in the city which appeared to be the registered address for eighty voters. Criticism of this sort isn’t conclusive, nor does it necessarily prove systematic unfairness in our electoral mechanisms, but at the very least it should put the EC on notice to consult at length before it conducts an exercise that leads to massive deletions from voter lists.
The police have been in the news in recent weeks for apprehending Bengali-speakers and pushing them over the border with Bangladesh. Notoriously, all the evidence the police apparently needed was the ‘fact’ that the suspects spoke the ‘Bangladeshi’ language, i.e. Bengali. Little wonder that voters and parties suspect hurried, large-scale exercises that threaten to call into question the citizenships of millions of voters. The police and the Election Commission seem to take their cue from the Central government, which has communalised the question of undocumented voters through
the Citizenship (Amendment) Act by creating a religious test for eligibility.
In his Red Fort address, the prime minister made a series of dog-whistling allegations about “infiltrators” or ghuspaithiyas (read Muslims and Christians) deliberately trying to change India’s demographic composition by targeting India’s daughters and sisters (read love jihad). What unites the prime minister’s inflammatory claims and the turmoil over the roll revision in Bihar is the bid to invalidate citizenship, seemingly without due process.
The Supreme Court has intervened to tell the Election Commission to post its rolls and its reasons for deletion and to accept the Aadhaar card and EPIC. It isn’t clear whether this is a binding instruction or a suggestion. In either case, the rules first framed by the Election Commission and the massive disenfranchisement that they have potentially created in Bihar have weakened trust in the most fundamental aspect of our democracy, elections.
Between the government boosting Hindu supremacist organisations and individuals on the Red Fort and in newspapers to politically-charged electoral exercises to weed out ‘infiltrators’, the Indian State has managed to impugn the democratic processes that underwrite its legitimacy. It is a form of self-harm that has few precedents in the history of stable democracies. When the language of the national anthem played at the Red Fort is stigmatised as a sign of illegality, it’s time for citizens to call the State to account.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
