Aakar Patel | Is Protest Only Means Left To Us To Take Back Democracy?

The three democratic tools available to us are the vote, the courts and protest. The only one over which Indians have real agency is protest.

Voting is considered to be the same thing as 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 aged 18 or above, 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 direction is more like a suggestion to the present Election Commission. It assumed, no doubt on the orders of the government, that its exercise to gratuitously put crores of people through trauma would carry on undisturbed.

A survey of how many rollbacks and clarifications it has issued over the last four weeks throws up a list of about one dozen.

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 for some people, a waiver for in-person appearance for other people, a review of flawed software, limiting (but not ending) the malicious practice of objections being filed by third party individuals 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 being made to do the extracurricular work that hapless public school officials have been running door to door doing, and other things besides.

The number of measures shows the sloppiness with which this adventure was embarked upon. The speed at which the measures are coming betrays the panic. The disclosure that the commission’s majority was being disregarded in decisions taken 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 voters, some struck off, some in appeal, some without information about their status, some beyond care, others awaiting judgment.

This steaming pile of excrement cannot be solved by anything other than a full rollback. Alas, now with elections already having taken place, even this action will lead to problems of electoral legitimacy, for instance in Bengal.

So, no. This mess is of a scale that could only have been erected by the architect of minimum government, maximum governance.

The second democratic tool we have is the courts. Article 32 says our right to move court for the enforcement of fundamental rights “is guaranteed”. Note that what is guaranteed is the liberty to move court. What follows from there in proceedings is something we can witness daily in this country and need not be expounded on further. Our finest lawyers have already spoken about where things stand. As with the Election Commission, there has been erosion here also.

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 it must stop. The government can mess around with our vote, as it is doing, and the justice system can toy with us as it does in service of the executive. It is harder for it to force itself on our bodies, though it tries.

Protest is our most effective tool at getting the state to stop misbehaviour. This is why there is such energy expended by the government in attempting to curb it, limit it and throttle it.

The farm laws, once Indians were mobilised in the tens of thousands and arrived in Delhi, were dead. It took a full year for the government to finally strike them down, and those months were wasted because the monarch did not want to be seen as surrendering to the people. But it was immediately clear to many the moment the mobilisation happened, that the people would win. Deliciously, this victory was accompanied by an apology. An apology that was a qualified one, as may 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 halting what has happened in Assam from happening elsewhere in India. Yes, it is true that the road this SIR has put us on ultimately takes us to the same destination, but recent events show that this will not be easy for the government to do uncontested no matter how much the BJP leadership salivates at the thought of crores of disenfranchised, disentitled and interned.

Peaceful assembly (Article 19) is a fundamental right, meaning one that enjoys a high degree of protection from encroachment by the government. But in practice, the encroachment has exceeded the freedom over the decades. And there it will remain, caged in designated areas and subject to government approval. Unless it is taken back, as today it is being by young women and men on the streets of Delhi.

For many of us, this is the most heartening feature of our times. A hard, authoritarian state finally challenged by a spirited public response from our youth.

Aakar Patel is a senior journalist and columnist