I have never been an enthusiastic voter. My father was a mid-level officer in the Indian Railways and we lived in various localities in Delhi. At that time, it was considered somewhat infra-dig to vote—after all, one had to stand in line with the hoi polloi to cast a vote. The vote really did not matter anyway, as the Congress was predominant and would win regardless of whether we voted. Other parties, particularly the Jana Sangh, were gradually coming to the fore and, by the late 1950s, had begun to win municipal elections.
This was long before T N Seshan’s stint as the Chief Election Commissioner. Political parties were so desperate to win votes that, at times, they hired cars to take voters to their polling booths. Party booth representatives kept a close watch on those on the voters’ list who had voted and those who had not, and sent party members to try and persuade the non-voters to come to the polling booth.
One such representative came to our house on Turkman Road in central Delhi and made an impassioned appeal to my father to “boat”. My father legitimately asked why he should go boating. “For parliament,” said the party member. My father pointed out that it was not possible to reach parliament by boat. The party member gave up on it as a lost cause.
My parents never voted in their lives. I preferred to enjoy my holiday rather than stand in line to cast my vote in an ill-kept primary school. I never voted in my home state Kerala until 1996, when I was posted to Delhi. I did not return to Kerala until I retired in 2011. In Delhi, I voted twice—in 2008 for the Delhi legislative assembly, and in 2009 for parliament. I was Cabinet Secretary then and it would have looked awkward if I did not have the mandatory black mark on my finger. After returning to Kerala, I voted again in 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2024.
The huge controversy regarding the special intensive revision, therefore, did not cause a flutter for me until it came home to roost. I assumed this was just another bureaucratic nightmare created by three bureaucrats sitting in the Election Commission. I have always held that when bureaucrats are vested with constitutional power, some of them go berserk. They try to express their authority by tormenting others. But it didn’t create a nuisance for me as long as it was confined to Bihar.
Now it has come home to me in Kerala. Suddenly, I was confronted with a long form with many entries in Malayalam. It wanted not merely my name and other details about me, my parents, and my wife, but also the details I had given in the previous SIR (of which I was totally unaware), including those of an undefined ‘bandhu’, or relative. Besides, I was required to affix a photograph to the form. I haven’t had my picture taken for a long time, as soft copies sent by email or WhatsApp usually suffice.
The booth level officer, a lady, did not merely have to collect the form, but also to ensure that I was not an unmitigated liar by collecting details of corresponding entries made in the 2002 electoral rolls. There was no way she could have done that, because I was working in Geneva in 2002. Of course I had voted in the 2000s—in Delhi in 2008 and 2009—but the local authorities in Kerala could not connect with the Delhi electoral rolls despite the enormous strides we are reputed to have made in digital technology.
I have what they call an EPIC, a voter identity card. This card was obtained with little effort. The chief electoral officer had himself sent someone to assist me in providing the details. The validity of this card is now under threat because if an entry in my name and my wife’s name is not found on the 2002 rolls, I would be considered ‘untraceable’ and therefore cease to exist, as so many thousands of disenfranchised Bihari migrants who work for short periods in northern cities and in the more prosperous southern states of India.
It doesn’t matter to us if my wife and I are denied the right to vote. We are in our seventies, with little interest in politics and governance. I am, however, afraid that if our names are removed from the voters’ list, I may, at some future date, be deprived of citizenship rights as well. The way the bureaucracy is being given a free hand to oppress the ordinary citizen, this too is not beyond the realms of possibility. And I feel sorry for the hard-pressed booth level officers, some of whom have died by suicide, leaving their wives, children, and aged parents to fend for themselves. This has gone beyond the limits of bureaucratic excess—it has assumed the dimensions of tyranny.
So far, successive election commissioners, governments, and political parties have tried to persuade more and more people to vote. Yet, at the 2024 general election, the national turnout was barely 66 percent, indicating that more than a third of the registered voters did not vote. I recall that the Election Commission had established a Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation division and institutionalised the National Voters’ Day on January 25.
Besides, the Election Commission had developed and deployed the Electoral Rolls Services Net, a sophisticated, centralised national database designed to detect ‘demographically similar entries’ and duplicates across constituencies. There are other countries like Australia, considered a gold standard for direct voter enrolment, as well as the US and the UK, where this kind of harassment is not known to take place en masse. There are other Indian government agencies, such as the income tax department, that focus on making tax filing easier for taxpayers. The Prime Minister himself has said, “It is the dream of the country to take India forward on the digital path at a rapid pace so that the life of every citizen becomes easier.”
The worst denouement of this controversy would be a conflict between the government and the opposition. A government that wants to make life easier for the people should look at the problems confronting voters fairly, and not be pushed into a corner where they have to defend what is clearly bureaucratic overreach.
K M Chandrasekhar | Former Cabinet Secretary and author of As Good as My Word: A Memoir
(Views are personal)
(kmchandrasekhar@gmail.com)