Her eyes misted over, I remember, with a feeling that was foreign to her. It was barely masked by the agitation in her voice. A fear that she did not recognise, and did not know she held within herself. This was not a Bangladeshi woman, and if you travel up the slope of dubiety as drawn these days, not even a Bengali Muslim, or a Muslim at all. It was a South Indian lady—of the sort to be found anywhere from Mylapore to Mysore. As archetypally ‘Indian’ as you want, with a lifetime spent in newspapers to boot. Nothing had prepared her for this. The unsettling realisation that the nursing home in Chennai where she was born did not exist anymore, and that she had no birth certificate.
Today, this sense is not dissimilar to vertigo, in a sudden onset, and practically each one of us has felt it in the last few months. The rollcall of big names who found themselves in that SIR limbo was plastered on the front pages: chief minister, former chief minister, etc etc. Kapil Sibal will write about his personal experience on these pages. The moral of the story is often worked out along the lines of, ‘If it can happen to the powerful, what chance do the others have?’ That’s right, of course, but it reverses the direction in which a certain voiding of rights has been proceeding in India’s constitutional being.
The flow of erasure is from the margins to the centre. It is created in the first instance for boundary phenomena, sometimes for understandable reasons, in ‘states of exception’. But once created, it behaves like a mutant microbe, takes on a life of its own and spreads everywhere. That’s where we find ourselves now. In the midst of a pandemic of disenfranchisement. The exception becomes the norm. At last glance, the dashboard showed 13 crore Indians struck off. It’s a reasonable guess that crores of them voted in five general elections since the SIR of 2002.
In his last stage show, Rahul Gandhi touched on a vital point that he did not elaborate upon—all the focus went to his more dramatic charge of treason and threat to bring Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar out of blanket legal immunity and into justice.
The figures of speech were crowd-pleasing, and perhaps sit awkwardly with the demands of prudence when seen at a higher level—points of law are not articulated best in retributive tones. What was not debatable was how he framed it at the outset: the vote inhabits the highest perch, higher even than the Constitution, let alone its functionaries or its judicial interpreters. This is substantially correct. It may seem counterintuitive at first, for was it not the Constitution of 1950 that gave us universal suffrage?
No. At the deepest genetic level, it was pre-scripted. The legal right to vote was bodied forth as an inevitable consequence of a prior event. When the British transferred power in 1947, the interim body created to receive that power was only an instrument, a power of attorney. On the model of the Irish in 1922, one of the first people to ‘decolonialise’, power was transferred in the name of the people: the collective popular sovereign.
It is the will of the people that sanctified the formal machinery to act on its behalf. The power to vote was not parcelled out in 1950 like an election freebie, in an act of benevolence, any more than the British acted out of charity. The coming into being of Indians as a collective sovereign political agency did not have to wait for the Constitution to ‘transfer’ this power on to them in 1950—as if there was a volitional element to it. They pre-exist the modern Indian republic and, in fact, birthed it.
It follows, logically, that this power cannot be extinguished by instruments lower in the hierarchy, entities that are only vouchsafed powers to act on their behalf. Executive, Legislature, Judiciary—all spring from this endowment. Yet, those who feel the State has been engaged in a kind of ‘lawfare’ wouldn’t be wrong.
We have observed a strange voiding created on the peripheries, colonising adjacent spaces one after the other, till it reached even the elite in Delhi. Its first appearance was on the conducive stage offered by Article 370, a widely impugned provision where a consensus of sorts was at hand. Preparatory to its annulment, a legal manoeuvre saw the people’s legislature ‘replaced’ by the President, so that popular consent could be expressed by a stroke of the Governor’s pen. Whatever your opinion on Article 370, the point here is the mechanics of erasure. It was Kashmir, so no one objected. But it created the template, even if the Supreme Court couldn’t sign off on that one.
It was in play again as constituencies were redrawn in Assam with the manifest objective of diluting the franchise of the Muslim of East Bengal origin. Again a borderline category, so again it passed without murmur. But from there to Justice Joymalya Bagchi’s remark about West Bengal’s disenfranchised—that “they can vote next time”—was a short step. And a Rekha Gupta or Kejriwal, an Advani or Jaishankar falling afoul of a software engineered to go rogue, the next. Last July, Ashok Lavasa had issued the first warning in this newspaper: it is not the Election Commission’s job to verify citizenship. But we are there, and it would behove the government to pull back from this brink in the direction of creating consent, not eliminating the need for it.
During a frantic search for my family coordinates from 2002 during SIR verification, my late mother was misidentified with a namesake from North Kolkata—for a while my citizenship seemed to hang in a limbo. When she was alive, nothing produced more violent reactions in her than electoral nihilism—somebody disparaging the vote. Even as an ordinary Indian citizen, it chafed against her very being as political person. In the modern republic, she knew it was the one thing that is sacred.
Read all columns by Santwana Bhattacharya
Santwana Bhattacharya
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