By Aakar Patel
The three democratic tools available to us are the vote, the court and protest. The only one over which Indians have true agency is protest.
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Voting is considered synonymous with democracy, as if democracy vanishes between elections. For decades, the election process in India has been accretive in adding prestige and credibility. That phase is behind us.
The Constitution says that every Indian over 18 who is not “disqualified under this Constitution or any law made by the appropriate Legislature on the ground of non-residence, unsoundness of mind, crime or corrupt or illegal practice” shall be entitled to be registered as a voter at any such election.
This constitutional direction appears to be little more than a suggestion to the present Election Commission. It assumed, no doubt at the government’s behest, that its exercise of gratuitously putting crores of people through trauma would continue undisturbed.
A survey of the rollbacks and clarifications issued over the past four weeks throws up a list of about a dozen measures.
These include a ‘special enrolment drive’ to bring in people left out by the previous special disenfranchisement drive.
Then there is the removal of a declaration requirement for some people, a waiver of in-person appearance for others, a review of flawed software, and restrictions on—but not an end to—the malicious practice of third-party individuals filing objections against voters, mostly Muslims, of course.
Then there is the introduction of searchable voter lists, after resisting them all this time for no reason other than opacity. And now private school teachers are being made to undertake the additional work that hapless public school officials have been carrying out door to door, among other tasks.
The number of measures reveals the sloppiness with which this exercise was launched. The speed at which they are being introduced betrays the panic. The disclosure that the Commission’s majority view was being disregarded in decision-making would have surprised few.
Will these subsequent corrections, rollbacks and reviews resolve the mess? Of course not. We have already been divided into several tiers of Indian citizens: some are voters, some have been struck off the rolls, some are appealing, some do not know their status, some have been abandoned to their fate, and others are awaiting judgment.
This steaming pile of excrement cannot be cleared up by anything short of a complete rollback. Alas, with elections already having taken place, even this would create problems of electoral legitimacy, for instance in Bengal.
So, no. This mess is of a scale that could only have been created by the architect of minimum government, maximum governance.
The second democratic tool available to us is the court. Article 32 states that our right to move the courts for the enforcement of fundamental rights “is guaranteed”. Note that what is guaranteed is the liberty to approach the courts. What follows in the ensuing proceedings is something we witness daily in this country and need not be elaborated upon. Our finest lawyers have already spoken about where things stand. As with the Election Commission, there has been an erosion of faith here as well.
The third democratic tool, the only one over which we have real agency, is protest: showing up to tell the state that we feel violated and that it must stop. The government can tamper with our vote, as it is doing, and the justice system can toy with us, as it does in the service of the executive. It is harder for the state to impose itself on our bodies, though it tries.
Protest is our most effective tool for getting the state to stop misbehaving. This is why the government expends so much energy attempting to curb, limit and throttle it.
The farm laws were effectively doomed once Indians mobilised in their tens of thousands and arrived in Delhi. It took a full year for the government to finally repeal them, and those months were wasted because the monarch did not want to be seen as surrendering to the people. But the moment the mobilisation took place, it was clear to many that the people would win. Deliciously, this victory was accompanied by an apology. It was a qualified apology, as might be expected from the person offering it, but an apology nonetheless.
The brave Muslim women who led the protests against the National Register of Citizens succeeded in preventing what had happened in Assam from being replicated elsewhere in India.
Yes, it is true that the road this SIR has put us on ultimately leads to the same destination. But recent events show that the government will find it difficult to get there without facing resistance, no matter how much the BJP leadership salivates at the thought of crores of people being disenfranchised, stripped of their entitlements and interned.
Peaceful assembly, protected under Article 19, is a fundamental right and therefore enjoys a high degree of protection against government encroachment. In practice, however, that encroachment has steadily eroded this freedom over the decades. And there it will remain, caged within designated areas and subject to government approval—unless the right is reclaimed, as young women and men are now doing on the streets of Delhi.
For many of us, this is the most heartening feature of our times: an authoritarian state finally being challenged by a spirited public response from our youth.
