In A Fine Balance, one of the finest novels about modern India set in the 1960s and 1970s, Rohinton Mistry powerfully conveys a sense of the social meaning of the vote for the Indians at the bottom of the ladder. Narayan, a Dalit tailor, insists on marking his own ballot in an upcoming election instead of allowing an upper-caste landlord’s men to vote on his behalf.
Dukhi, his father, warns him against it. “It is still my right,” Narayan replies. “And I will exercise it in the next election, I promise you.”
Dukhi urges him not to risk his life.
“Life without dignity is worthless,” Narayan replies.
I have been rereading Mistry’s novel over the past few weeks as a series of protests has turned October into a month of fierce battles over the integrity of India’s elections, the accountability of its institutions, the right to protest, and the soul of its democracy.
A nascent Gen-Z movement, Cockroach Janta Party, which organized protests over education and unemployment in Delhi in June and July and forced the resignation of India’s higher education minister, gave the call for the October protests. Young protestors answered with an insurrectionary energy in the summer and soon found support from a broader coalition comprised of opposition parties, social movements and other pillars of Indian civil society.
These assorted protesters see the stakes of the current moment as existential: the sanctity of the vote in India, the essential ingredient, in other words, of democracy. Throughout October thousands joined the cause in Delhi and other Indian cities, their marches spurred by anger directed against an ongoing national exercise to overhaul the country’s electoral register.
Known as the Special Intensive Revision, the exercise has, according to the protestors, resulted in more than 130 million voters being removed from electoral lists. Although electoral rolls have been revised periodically, this is the first time such an exercise has placed the burden on citizens to establish their eligibility, raising fears that millions of legitimate voters, particularly the poor and marginalized, could be disenfranchised.
Seeking accountability, they have been calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the country’s chief election commissioner, who oversees the Election Commission of India, the body charged with conducting and safeguarding the sanctity of elections across the nation. The protestors accuse Kumar of abandoning his constitutional obligation to act impartially. In their telling, the mandarin has set the table in a way to favor the interests of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a charge denied by those in power.
Already shaken by the summer protests over education, this time the Indian government responded with coercive force, effectively turning central Delhi, the political and administrative heart of the capital, and the place where India goes to protest, into a garrison. On Oct. 10, it deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel, restricted internet access, detained thousands of protesters, and sought to deny the protesters access to public spaces across the capital.
The crackdown was intense. On the night of Oct. 16, there was a palpable sense of panic on social media in India as an urgent question was asked repeatedly: Where is Neha Bora? A 29-year-old doctoral student and left-wing activist, Bora has emerged as one of the most articulate and formidable leaders of these protests, which have rattled Modi’s government and—despite valiant attempts to construct a counter narrative by BJP leaders and other party apparatchiks—become a significant challenge to his popularity and legitimacy.
Bora was detained by the police on their way to join the thousands of protesters who had converged on Connaught Place, a prominent commercial district in the capital, waving the national flag and reiterating demands to protect the right to vote and the sanctity of electoral democracy in India. For several hours after sunset, there was no news of the whereabouts of Bora, who uses they/them pronouns. Their lawyers spoke about the police refusing to reveal their location. Eventually, around midnight, their lawyers located them at a police station.
When Bora was released on Saturday morning, they tweeted, “Fighting for democracy and the Constitution cannot be criminalized.” It was a neat summation of the sentiment moving so many Indians to take to the streets, namely a sense of being robbed of something of existential proportions. “Now if they take away our right to vote,” a protester told a reporter, “what is left with us?”
The power of the vote
The emotional charge behind the protests has its roots in the birth of the modern Indian nation-state itself. India always took great pride in adopting universal franchise rights as the Constitution of India came into effect on Jan. 26, 1950. In its historic first general elections in 1952, every Indian above the age of 21, irrespective of caste, religion, gender, race or wealth, had their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. It was, as many legal and constitutional scholars have since remarked, a colossal feat, and one that became a touchstone for the modern idea of India.
Hence the current upheaval in the country. The Modi government may be reversing decades of democratic gains by recasting the act of voting as a privilege, conferred at the discretion of bureaucrats or as a favor from the ruling party, rather than a right guaranteed by the constitutional order. Now, every prospective voter must first complete an enumeration form, and many may subsequently be required to produce onerous documentary evidence, such as birth certificates and educational records to establish their eligibility to vote. Tens of millions of Indians from marginalized communities either lack documentary records or possess documents that are riddled with mistakes such as spelling errors, making it harder for them to navigate any process of bureaucratic verification.
The fear is that India is—to put it bluntly—being yanked back to a darker time, one from which it emerged in no small part because of the work done over decades to firmly establish the credibility and broaden the depth of its democratic franchise. In the 1950s, India was an overwhelmingly rural country, with around 83% of its population living in the villages and only about 17% in urban areas. Its nascent democratic system confronted entrenched social hierarchies of caste and power. Early accounts of grassroots democracy in India describe how higher-caste landowners controlled the votes of their lower-caste dependents, sometimes even marking ballots that the voters had to authenticate with their thumbprints.
The pioneering Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas showed how politicians campaigning for votes treated villagers not as individual voters with agency but as members of “vote banks.” Politicians approached landlords or community leaders to deliver these blocs of votes in return for favors from the government, from “licenses for buses and rice-mills to seats in medical and technological colleges for their kinsfolk.”
And well into the 1960s, millions of Indians were still unable to exercise their constitutional right to vote. In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, landlords used club-wielding enforcers known as lathaits to keep Dalits, members of the most oppressed caste, out of polling booths. “I remember watching members of my caste being dragged out of a polling booth,” an elderly Dalit man in Bihar’s Siwan district recalled in an interview with The Print, an Indian news site.
During the state elections in 1967, Jagdish Master, a teacher turned activist, challenged the veto of the landlords over Dalit suffrage by escorting a group of Dalits to a polling booth in Ekwari, a village in Bihar’s Bhojpur district. The landlords’ henchmen brutally beat him and drove him out. He returned to the village as an armed guerrilla, recruiting Dalit laborers and other poor peasants in a Maoist-style rural insurgency that would flare across the region for decades.
The power of the vote in Indian consciousness transformed radically after the “Emergency,” the period between June 1975 and March 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended constitutional rights, assumed untrammeled powers, imprisoned opposition leaders and silenced the press. Much of India’s elite—bureaucrats, businessmen, newspaper editors and movie stars—bent the knee and welcomed Mrs. Gandhi’s promise of “order” and “discipline.” Wealth and connections offered protection from the state. India’s poor, stripped of their electoral power, suffered terrible abuses of an unaccountable bureaucracy and police from slum demolitions to forced sterilization of men.
In the general elections held in March 1977 after the end of the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress Party was decisively defeated by the people and tossed out of power for the first time since Indian independence in 1947. The principal victims of abuses of the Emergency—Dalits, Muslims, and the poor of the populous northern Indian states—voted against the Congress party for the first time and contributed significantly to its removal from power
The power of the vote has gradually forced India’s high-handed bureaucracy to recognize the human dignity and political citizenship of ordinary people. The electorate delivered its verdict on Mrs. Gandhi’s breach of the sacred covenant between the Indian state and its people: the people confer legitimacy on the state in exchange for their rights, including its protection of the sanctity of the vote. Having asserted their power, voters proved difficult to subdue again. As the political theorist Partha Chatterjee put it, it was the 1977 defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress party that established the “capacity of the vote.”
A silent revolution
India’s poor and marginalized took proper control of their voting choices three decades after independence. In the years after the Emergency, they leveraged the vote as a means to a secure livelihood or as a tool for ensuring justice. Politicians could no longer rely on local patrons to intimidate people into voting for them and had to compete on representing their interests. A new competitive politics emerged in the 1980s and led to an upsurge, as Chatterjee wrote, “of popular demands of a kind that had never before been allowed to disturb the order and tranquility of the proverbial corridors of power.”
By the 1990s, political leaders from socially disenfranchised castes and Dalit communities were taking power in the populous, northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot memorably described it as “the silent revolution.” This revolution, ushered in by the votes of the historically oppressed communities, did not quite transform the economic and social structures of the region. But it changed the everyday relations of power. Indrajit Roy, a scholar of development studies, recalled a refrain he heard frequently during his fieldwork among Dalits in Bihar in the late 2000s: “There has been development, change has come. Today, we can look the landlord in the eye and speak as equals.”
Vote banks had thus turned into vehicles of collective political assertion. Marginalized communities had become adept at pooling their votes to secure political favors and advance their shared interests. They chose their own patrons, preferring their own caste leaders to represent their interests and negotiate with the state on their behalf.
Over time, the clientelist politics of vote banks became associated with an entrenched culture of corruption. This helped pave the way for Modi’s successful national campaign in 2014, in which he cast himself as a populist strongman who embodied the aspirations for “development” of all Indians while portraying the Congress and regional parties as beholden to their respective vote banks. Modi’s attacks on vote bank politics also carried a more sinister charge: that successive governments had appeased India’s Muslims minority, which accounts for around 14% of the population, for their votes at the expense of the national interest.
Bangladesh borders the Indian state of West Bengal and Modi reserved his sharpest, xenophobic barbs for Bengal’s Muslims, whom he tarred during his 2014 campaign as “Bangladeshi” and “illegal immigrants,” establishing a template for their vilification that persists to this day. In an inflammatory campaign speech, Modi issued an ominous warning: “After May 16 [the day of the results of the 2014 elections], these Bangladeshis better be prepared with their bags packed.”
A dangerous exclusion
The Modi government invoked that very specter of the “illegal, Bangladeshi Muslim” to push through revisions to electoral rolls across most Indian states. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, who had earlier likened Bangladeshi immigrants to “termites,” responded to the ongoing protests by calling them an “action plan to protect infiltrators.”
There are no reliable estimates of how many Bangladeshi immigrants live in India. In 2016, a minister of the Modi government told the parliament, without citing a source, that the country was home to some 20 million “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.” The government later acknowledged that it had no accurate data on the number of illegal immigrants in India.
Yet the Indian government has used unfounded speculation about “illegal” Bangladeshis to overturn the fundamental logic of the country’s electoral registration system, shifting the burden of ensuring registration from the Election Commission to the voter herself. The commission was responsible for ensuring that every citizen made it onto the electoral rolls.
The exercise has already disproportionately disenfranchised the poor, migrants, religious minorities, women—and is bound to continue doing so. “The majority of voters in Bihar who were excluded from the list were in rural areas,” said retired Maj. Gen. Anil Verma, who heads the Association for Democratic Reforms, a nonprofit group that challenged the electoral rolls revisions in the Supreme Court. “Those worst affected were the poor and the marginalized—they had no documents.”
Opposition parties have also alleged that the electoral roll revisions tilted the electoral field in the BJP’s favor in the West Bengal election held earlier this year, helping the party win power in the state for the first time. An analysis by the SABAR Institute, a public policy research institute, lent some credence to that charge: a disproportionate share of the 9.08 million voters removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls came from constituencies held by the then-ruling Trinamool Congress or those with large Muslim populations.
The Election Commission has denied the charge that the deletions were politically motivated, arguing that it applied uniform criteria to remove entries for voters who had died, were registered more than once or had permanently relocated. But that claim is difficult to reconcile with the disproportionate representation of certain groups among those deleted from supplementary lists issued for some constituencies after an adjudication process. For instance, although Muslims make up around 23% of the population of Nandigram, a constituency in West Bengal, the SABAR Institute study found that they accounted for 95.5% of the deletions across seven supplementary lists released by the Election Commission for the constituency.
Voting carries an almost existential significance for Indians whose equal citizenship has not been fully recognized by the institutions of the state. Indians see the vote as an affirmation of their existence. If the vote is no longer a gift freely given or withdrawn by the people but a resource controlled by the state, it reduces ordinary voters once again to supplicants dependent on the favor of political elites.
The electoral revisions and mass deletion of voters have provoked such widespread revulsion because many Indians see it as an assault on their identity as citizens and a threat to the social recognition they have won through a long, arduous struggle. Many Indians might have forgiven Modi for his numerous missteps but they are determined not to let him devalue their voting power.
We that are young
The young protesters moving through Delhi’s barricaded streets carry a palpable sense that they are living through a historical moment. References to the Quit India movement against the country’s erstwhile British colonizers and the protests around the Emergency have become commonplace. Memories of seminal events of the past offer a lens through which to consider the present. The future seems open to change through collective action. This sense of a turning point imbues individual actions with a larger purpose and drives protesters to confront a police force intent on clearing the streets by whatever means necessary.
On Oct. 9, a day before Delhi was placed under a lockdown, Bora invoked India’s struggle against British imperialism to denounce the pre-emptive detention of protest organizers. “History is repeating itself. Just like in 1942, the arrest of leaders could not stop the Quit India movement; this movement will also not stop,” Bora said. “This is nothing but a state of open emergency in the country.”
The convergence of young people’s anger over education and employment, fears of authoritarianism, and concern for the sanctity of the vote poses a serious challenge to the Modi government. It could forge a broad popular coalition of unemployed young people, urban poor, Dalits and religious minorities, united in challenging the legitimacy of the government. Unless the government retreats on electoral roll revisions, sustained protests could drain its political capital.
One of Indian democracy’s great achievements is that even its poorest citizens have proved adept at recognizing when the power of their vote is being wrested away, gauging the consequences and organizing to resist. A government in India can retain its legitimacy despite failing to provide functioning schools or decent employment. It cannot do so if it also violates the sanctity of the vote.