Shikha Mukerjee | Loss Of People’s Faith in EC Puts Republic At Risk

The institution of the Election Commission, in its new avatar or in its constitutionally prescribed original form, has a function, a process to fulfil that function and discharge its responsibility. It is to enable people to exercise their right to vote, which can also be seen as the responsibility or duty of the sovereign, the individual voter, to decide who shall represent her/him and govern in her/his name.

The EC’s job is to ensure every entitled voter, every citizen over 18, finds it easy to exercise her/his right to pick a representative through a secret ballot on the basis of universal adult franchise. The inclusion of all voters, enabling them to vote, is the EC’s job, excluding 36 lakh names out of a total 7.9 crore voters in Bihar, following the Special Intensive Revision, is not the EC’s job.

Saying these voters are untraceable or have permanently shifted, and another seven lakh voters were incorrectly enrolled, is not a sufficient reason to exclude any one of these 43 lakh previously enrolled voters. Migration out of a state has been listed by the EC as a reason for disempowerment. And migration was turned into a weapon to identify “Bangladeshi language” speakers, according to a Delhi police notice that reached Banga Bhavan, the West Bengal state house in Delhi. The EC’s obsession with detecting illegal immigrants allegedly masquerading as citizens on the basis of fake documents is chilling.

This rigmarole of the EC deciding which documents are more credible as proof of citizenship compared to other documents has perplexed the voter, political parties and even the Supreme Court. Having spent over Rs 9,000 crores on including even newborns as part of the Aadhaar system that records address, name and age of persons, is mandatory as a proof of person for bank accounts that link a beneficiary of a direct cash transfer scheme, the EC’s decision to reject it as identity proof is scarily similar to the BJP’s continuing campaign against Bangladeshi-Rohingya infiltrators or illegals.

The victim of the EC’s new avatar and new rules is the voter. Voters have a right to decide about participating in the voting process. Since the SIR list of voters is still at a “draft” stage, the fact is that 43 lakh missing or incorrectly enrolled voters may or may not be excluded. If even one voter is wrongly excluded due to the SIR process of SIR, that is a breach of trust, a failure of responsibility and the violation of a fundamental right.

The famed vibrancy of India’s democracy is illustrated by the high voter turnout in most areas during elections. The flaws and fractures in India’s democracy aren’t usually debated as voter participation is around 60 per cent in Bihar, while in West Bengal it often exceeds 80 per cent, and in some places, like Nagaland, voter participation is 83 per cent or so, higher still in tiny little Lakshadweep represented by a single MP.

The Indian voter understands and knows the value of the vote. The voter understands that populist politics, often described as “cash-for-votes” politics of the Lakshmir Bhandar-Laldi Behena variety, is at its most frenzied when elections are due.

The voter understands and knows that the vote is a “cashable coupon”. Therefore, excluding even one “genuine” voter, who is not the same as a “false” voter, is like disenfranchisement, amounting to real deprivation of the power to negotiate.

The exclusion of even one legitimate or genuine voter is the same as a deliberate step to disempower that voter. That is the discourse that is developing from the EC’s SIR experiment, the high point of which is based on a suspicion that citizens are not citizens and must therefore prove that they are citizens. The proof required by the EC in Bihar’s case, and which doubtless will be required for citizens of every state where SIRs are held later, has turned out to be the tale of a dog chasing its own tail, a vicious circle of manufacturing documents to establish that previous inclusion in the voters’ list was not on the basis of other manufactured documents.

What it boils down to is this: the most vulnerable, the most marginalised, the daily wage worker, who may or may not be a migrant, is up against the State in a fight that is so unequal that she-he needs all the support that Opposition political parties, civil society and the media can give to prevent being excluded, stripped of rights and power and basically thrown out as waste, by the Election Commission.

The accusation against the EC’s authority in its pilot SIR drive in Bihar, that the flawed revision is politically driven, are two factors: the BJP, which heads the minority government in New Delhi, is spectacularly aloof from among the protesters against the SIR process; two, members of the BJP and some allied parties that make up the majority coalition of the National Democratic Alliance government headed by Narendra Modi

have been mostly silent and the ones who have said something have been singularly cautious, like JD(U) Banka MP Giridhari Yadav, who said he had doubts.

The weeks of controversy over the process of enrolling the sovereign, as in the voter in Bihar, through the Special Intensive Revision and its new rules of determining who shall be entitled to vote, has been a political dogfight. The Opposition under the INDIA banner is marshalling its forces to fight more.

The INDIA partners need to go beyond the disempowerment of voters. Thousands and thousands of people with MGNREGA job cards have not been paid in West Bengal, for instance. The penalty that MGNREGA job card holders have paid is because of New Delhi’s reason that there are irreconcilable accounting problems on account of unsatisfactory utilisation certificates. The Narendra Modi government does not appear to appreciate that people who work on MGNREGA jobs are in desperate need of the paltry payouts, even after the Calcutta high court directed that payments cannot be withheld and the work programme needed to restart. The Modi government has now turned discrimination into a policy instrument.

The EC’s actions are also discriminatory. The fact of the matter is that the EC’s reputation has been soiled by accusations, always from the Opposition to the party in power, the Congress in the past, the BJP now, that it serves the interests of the ruling establishment. Never before, however, has there been a loss of public confidence in an institution on such a scale; the distrust destabilises the structure of the Republic and the idea of democracy.