NB: The rule of capital is an indirect despotism, mediated by ideology. In the successor states of the British empire in South Asia the communal hatred that accompanied Independence and partition resulted in a permanent military dictatorship in Pakistan; and an uneasy tension between secular democracy and communal politics in India. Over the past decade the criminal core of Hindutva and its political votaries has emerged into broad daylight. We are speeding towards direct despotism. The following are the outstanding features of the ruling establishment:
it uses democracy to destroy democracy
it demands eternal power in the name of the people – defined as those who agree with it
it seeks the ‘look’ of legitimacy by subjugating the autonomy of state institutions including the judiciary
it replaces politics by theatre and crushes dissent; it conflates perception with reality
it redefines public life as a permanent conflict between Hindus and Muslims
it feeds on and intensifies the criminalisation of the Indian polity with its endemic corruption and periodic massacres
it understands that endless communal propaganda via a pliant media has failed to hold the state together
as the (temporary) master of the state machine it has now resorted to conspiracy and violence in broad daylight
130 million or more Indians have been illegally disenfranchised by state institutions and in front of the judiciary
an organised crime – of long standing and bare fangs – confronts us in the face
Indian business and politics have produced a self-incubated East India Company – on which more later: DS
The reason the SIRs have been blundering and disruptive is down to the desperation of the BJP. No longer able to rely on its mobilisational muscle to win absolute majorities, it can’t leave anything to chance
The mass exclusion of voters from the electoral rolls through the Special Intensive Revision process initiated by the Election Commission of India just before state elections (as in West Bengal) is the latest stage of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s long-cherished aim of creating a made-to-measure electorate. In an earlier phase, the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act were meant to achieve the same object: the NRC would weed out inadequately documented Indians while the CAA would help restore citizenship to non-Muslims (read Hindus) who became ‘collateral’ damage in the NRC exercise.
However, the NRC proved unwieldy and slow and the setback of the 2024 general elections, which saw the BJP lose its absolute majority in Parliament, made the task of selecting a new, more pliable, people more urgent. It helped that the new law passed in 2023 for constituting the Election Commission allowed the government a two-to-one majority in the selection panel. The Commission, now refashioned into an Inquisition, would, under the pretext of updating the electoral rolls, perform the task of certifying true Indians and casting out false citizens.
Even before Ritika Chopra’s methodical exposé of the rogue, rule-flouting behaviour of the Election Commission in The Indian Express, it was common knowledge that over 27 lakh voters in West Bengal had not been allowed to exercise their franchise in the last state election. Objections to their inclusion had been centrally generated, not routed through the local EROs as the law requires. The Supreme Court was complicit in this exclusion, airily concluding that excluded voters whose appeals were successful would be able to vote in subsequent elections. Nine out of ten excluded voters whose appeals were processed were deemed legitimate. An election was lost and won while more than two million voters were excluded without due process. It’s worth noting here that going by the rate at which the EC is processing appeals, it will take between 12 and 13 years for the 3.7 million pending cases to be processed.
The reason that this travesty of a state election caused less outrage than subsequent revelations about the EC is that West Bengal was seen as a volatile, ungovernable, rampantly infiltrated border state ruled by an unpredictable maverick, Mamata Banerjee. Amongst India’s respectable classes, including some who didn’t support the BJP, there was the feeling that the Trinamool Congress in particular and Bengal in general were due a comeuppance. The mass disenfranchisement of inconvenient electors was glossed over as a detail in the drama of the BJP’s win.
The trouble with licensing an Inquisition (and acquiescing in its purges) is that you have no recourse when it comes for you. We have seen ornaments of the Indian ruling class caught up in the dragnet of the Election Commission. Surjit Bhalla, an economist and investor close to the National Democratic Alliance government, was bathetically outraged in an opinion piece when he found himself at the sharp end of Delhi’s SIR. With the privileged, so long as they aren’t Muslim or otherwise suspect, these exclusions will likely be remedied. But given the government’s need to win large states like UP and, more importantly, to cut the electorate down to size before the next general election, the EC has been licensed to move quickly and break things.
The gamble seems to be that the hostility of the excluded won’t matter electorally because they won’t be able to vote their displeasure, while the generality of voters might be persuaded to forget the inconvenience of the SIR process if it can be sold to them as a grand cleansing of the public sphere. There is a precedent for this; demonetisation and its devastation of the informal sector didn’t hurt the BJP politically. Just as demonetisation allegedly purged the economy of black money, this SIR samudra manthan, this new churning of the waters, promises to purge the polity of false citizens and create a purely Bharatiya political community.
The documentary obstacle course that the SIR sets up is like The Hunger Games. Depending upon the outcome, it can produce anxiety, relief or schadenfreude. To not make the voter list in a world where databases are interconnected can mean, as Goans have discovered, that they can’t access medical care and critical treatments like chemotherapy. The BJP’s calculation is that the trauma caused by the SIR can be sublimated into the conviction that cleansing the body politic of encroaching aliens (read Muslims) makes the pain worthwhile.
The problem for Narendra Modi is that his second bid to harness what he imagines is the heroic masochism of the Hindu masses will come unstuck because a) it comes after he lost his absolute majority in the 2024 general election and, with it, his aura of permanence and b) it comes after he was routed and mocked by the uprising of the young led by the Cockroach Janta Party. Amongst the many revelations about the perverse efforts of the Election Commission to exclude voters is its recent unwillingness to periodically open the rolls to include new eighteen year olds. Given the chief election commissioner’s growing reputation as an agent of the State, it is hard to believe that the young will want to enlist themselves in this Inquisition.
The singular achievement of Ritika Chopra’s reports is to show that the CEC’s violation of laws and rules and basic conventions was so egregious that his otherwise pliant fellow commissioners felt compelled to object. The sideshow to the EC’s antics has been the complicity of the Supreme Court, its deference to executive power, its willingness to sacrifice the basic building block of a democracy — the right to vote — to accommodate the State. It has been estimated that the SIR, given its current rate of exclusion, could shrink the Indian electorate by 15 crore. That’s a hundred and fifty million people. One in every ten Indians would be disenfranchised.
Narendra Modi is fond of saying ‘One Nation, One Election’. His government would like to synchronise state elections and general elections. If he had his way, elections at every level would be centrally scheduled and run by an Election Commission that has been shown to control local electoral rolls through centralised software. Those rolls would record a purged and shrunk electorate.
The problem for Modi is that he doesn’t have an absolute majority. As Asim Ali presciently wrote some days before the last general election, if “the BJP falls significantly below the absolute majority and the Congress crosses the three-digit threshold”, this would quash Modi’s “aura of invincibility”. That’s what happened. The CJP’s insolent satyagraha and Modi’s rout wouldn’t have been possible without that electoral setback. After years of sycophancy, the press wouldn’t have found the nerve to blow the whistle on the craven partisanship of Gyanesh Kumar. Saurav Das and Abhijeet Dipke wouldn’t be calling Supreme Court judges and Narendra Modi to account with such scant deference. Elections have consequences.
The reason the SIRs have been blundering and disruptive is down to the desperation of the BJP. No longer able to rely on Modi’s charisma or its mobilisational muscle to win absolute majorities, it can’t leave anything to chance. Sabyasachi Das, the economist, had to quit his job at Ashoka University after he published a paper, warning that the 2019 general election, especially in close contests, might have been marred by electoral manipulation, both at the stage of voter registration and at the time of voting and counting. These SIRs are a brazen suppression of voter registration on a gigantic scale. Threatening to take our votes away is one way of running an election but it’s not, I think, a winning pitch.
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Dilip Simeon: Militant capitalism, bad infinity, and the longing for total revolution
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Apoorva Mandhani: Judge Loya’s Confidants Died Mysterious Deaths
Domination and Chaos: India’s radical conservatism
How the RSS, Golwalkar & Hindu Mahasabha glorified caste: Devanur Mahadevan
Pakistan’s First Law & Labour Minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal’s Resignation Letter, October 1950
