NB: In other words, the BJP/RSS government is now selecting the electorate. As Bertold Brecht wrote in his poem The Solution, (1953) on the East German government’s despotic ways: Perhaps the government ought to dissolve the people and elect another? DS

Exercises like the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls presage a state of affairs where documents and IDs can never prove sound identification and where citizenship of the ordinary resident is eternally questioned.

Nayanika Mathur & Tarangini Sriraman

A surreal application form for a residence certificate filled in the name of ‘Cat Kumar’, next to a photo of a grumpy feline, went viral recently, even attracting a police case. This form, while intended as a farcical response to the documentary mandates of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, speaks not only to the absurdity but also to the extraordinary expectations of the exercise.

In the ongoing discussions on the SIR, an argument on document scarcity is becoming hegemonic. This is the belief that people do not possess the documents in the list of 11 IDs prescribed by the Election Commission of India (ECI).At one point, it was stated that if voters were able to prove that they were included in the 2003 electoral roll, they would be exempted from producing any of these documents. From surveys to jansunwais to op-eds to ground reports, a vast literature has now been built up that is aimed at proving how and why these newly-prescribed documents are not in the possession of most. This literature has done vital work in showing how disenfranchisement is working and why the SIR is such a dangerous exercise.

At the very same time, we are concerned that an excessive focus on document scarcity in discussions on the SIR can come to function as a red herring. What also needs to be centred is that the SIR is a never-before-seen bureaucratic narrowing down in how voters get to stay on the electoral rolls, a move that is making – or could potentially make – identification an impossibility for almost anyone.

A singular or overwhelming focus on how people don’t hold the required documents can keep one from noting how citizenship and belonging are being reformulated bureaucratically and through seemingly routine procedures—such as revision of electoral rolls or the (re-)institution of a registry of citizens—in line with the majoritarian politics of ‘New India’. The increasing impossibility of being firmly and fully identified is leading to the creation of a new form of what we term extraordinary citizenship, a category of Indians who have ticked every box of proving their belonging and their right to vote not just in the documentary and procedural senses but also socially, politically and ideologically….

https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/when-state-always-doubts-your-identity

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