Shashi Warrier | The Chinese Curse, India’s Voter Rolls And Fixing Democracy

On the last day of the Puja vacation, fed up with the steady stream of visitors, I turned off the lights in the verandah and the sitting room, and huddled in the bedroom in the hope that Prita and I would be left alone that evening.

I had settled into my favourite chair when the doorbell rang. There stood Raghavan on the doorstep. He bore a box of books for Prita and a bottle for me. "I know you don't read much," he told me apologetically.

I fetched glasses and poured him a drink while Prita oohed and aahed her way through the volumes in the box, enough to keep her busy for a couple of months. "How come?" I asked when she went off to fetch snacks.

“Someone I know had to shut down his library because people seem to have given up reading,” Raghavan replied. “I bought some of them at a discount, and added some of my own that she might like.”

“Have you read all of them?” I asked.

He nodded. “In my line of work it pays to read,” he said, “but I’m choosy about what I read.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You need to think straight,” he said, “and I’m afraid most of us can’t. As you can see from the protests spreading all over the country.”

“You mean about the election commissioner?” I asked.

“Not really,” he replied. “We need to understand where we want to go as a society.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Let me try to simplify it for you.” He took a deep breath, as if preparing to dive into ice water. “Let’s start with the basics, okay?”

“Yes,” I said, relaxing.

“We’re an electoral democracy, right?” he said. When I nodded, he continued, “And we need to keep the elections clean. The first thing we need is a clean list of voters?” I nodded again. “People are born, people die, people move, right?” Nod yet again. “And then there are people who enter the country illegally. We have some porous borders, right?”

I nodded, because I understood that. “Yes,” I said.

“We have hundreds of millions of voters,” he said, “and when we try to clean up voter lists of that size, it’s quite likely we’re going to have a few errors. So we’re going to have some people who should be on the list excluded, and some who shouldn’t kept on. Okay so far?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So suppose you clean up the rolls,” he said, “and remove a million names from the list who don’t deserve to be there because they’ve died or shifted. You also remove a lakh names that aren’t eligible to be there because they entered the country illegally. In the process you also remove a few hundred names that should be there. Got that?”

“Yes,” I said. But I was beginning to get dizzy.

The doorbell rang. Prita joined us with the snacks and Murthy, whose nose hadn’t failed him. I fetched a glass for him while Raghavan brought him up to date.

When Murthy was settled, Raghavan continued. “So we have a conflict. We need to clean up the list but we really don’t know how to because it’s easy to get fake documents, aadhar cards and pan cards, if you can pay the right people. We can’t really trust the usual documents.”

“So what do we do?” asked Prita.

“One way to do it would be to clean up the lists in a few sample districts, under Supreme Court supervision, on whatever basis the election commission chooses,” he replied. “Then use that to work out a better method and run it state by state, fine tuning it as we go along. So at the end of one election cycle we have an acceptable basis.”

“But then the elections that are held during this learning period are going to be biased,” said Murthy.

“Yes,” said Raghavan. “There are going to be mistakes anyway, but the real question is, will they be more biased than if you don’t try to clean up? In any case, no matter what you try, there’ll be people protesting, because no system is perfect.”

“What if you just keep going?” I asked.

“No protests,” Raghavan said. “But corrupt election results... The whole country suffers. If we don’t clean up our voter lists, our elections are compromised. But we don’t know how to clean up our voter lists.”

“Well, we’ve got by all these years...” I said.

“I’ll tell you what scares me. We have harder times coming. Poor rainfall, wars, oil prices, a worldwide economic slowdown, aggressive neighbours, one falling apart, a mad superpower. And in the midst of this, an Election Commission that seems to be pushing the government’s agenda.”

“A guy called Gramsci said something like this nearly a century ago,” said Prita. “‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’ The trouble is identifying the monsters.”

“So?” asked Murthy.

“So we need a robust election system in hard times,” said Raghavan, “and getting rid of the CEC isn’t enough. Those monsters might be among us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The most contentious errors on the voter lists,” said Raghavan, “come from corrupt or perverse government systems. So, let a Joint Parliamentary Committee debate the voter list revision methods in advance. And let the Supreme Court review them.”

“Difficult,” said Murthy. “It’ll take too long.”

“Well, then it looks like the Chinese have cursed us,” said Raghavan, “you know, the curse that goes, ‘May you live in interesting times!’”