AAKAR PATEL
Nowadays for a homeless person to fulfil the re quirement of a place of res idence, ‘The Booth Level Officer (BLO) will visit the address given… at night to ascertain that the homeless person actually sleeps at the place listed as their address… If the BLO verifies that the homeless person actually sleeps at that place, no doc umentary proof of residence shall be necessary.’ (Hand Book for Booth Level Of ficers, Election Commission of India 2011)”. The September 25, 1948 press note covered in detail ‘Refugees Rights as Electors’, and the instructions for their inclusion on the electoral rolls. The press continued to bring stories from across the country under the occasional title: ‘Progress in Prepara tion of Electoral Rolls’. It re ported that the East Punjab Government extended the final date for the completion of electoral rolls to October 31, 1948, because a large number of people had not registered themselves. These passages are taken from the book ‘How India Became Democratic: Citizen ship and the Making of the Universal Franchise’ by Ornit Shani. The point is to show how, for decades, the focus of the Indian State has been on inclusion when it has come to voters and their rights. Here is another instruction from the government: “Per sons sleeping in a pedhi or shop or servants sleeping in the loft of a hotel will be en titled to be included in the electoral roll for the areas in which the pedhi or the shop or the hotel as the case may be is situated. Similarly va grants living in huts erected on municipal land will also be entitled to be registered as voters. Domestic servants who sleep in general or rear passages, balconies or stair cases are also eligible for in clusion.” Some 25 years ago, there was an interview on a Pa kistani channel by their famous journalist Najam Sethi of Manohar Singh Gill. Gill had just retired as In dia’s chief election commis sioner and the discussion was about the introduction of the electronic voting machine. The device was thought to be overly com plex and intimidating to use. To test this, Gill and his team took it to a vegetable market. They observed how those in the market used it in their experiment and dis covered what all of us know now: that it is easy to use. This ended a period in India’s electoral history where elections were of ten disputed, with accusa tions of wrongdoing (what was called in those days booth-capturing). We do not hear that any longer because, like in the matter of inclusion of electors, the State and the Election Commission were focussed on the rights of vot ers and how to make their voting easier. That period has ended now. That focus has also ended. The government and the Election Commission are now intent on exclusion and they have been successful at doing this. The recent re moval of millions of Benga lis from the voting list has received the sanction of the Supreme Court and will be repeated in other States. Eligible voters wrongly re moved can appeal and may be able to get them reinstat ed later but their vote this time is denied. To many this seems like an illegitimate election and this is why we have ended the Indian era where political parties and particularly the parties that lost elections, accepted the results and the election as being fair and free. There will be other issues associ ated with this for millions of individuals. One head line from May 13 reads: “SIR-deleted can’t avail govt schemes, says Bengal govt; Bihar CM talks of cancelling bank passbooks.” But we need not go there today. Why are we deliberately taking apart an electoral sys tem that has worked? There is no answer to that, and there is no data and has nev er been any on the absurd slander that foreigners are voting here. Like the mon strous NRC process in Assam, which began with a hyster ical note from its then gov ernment with no supporting data, we have assumed there is a condition and are intent on addressing it through the most extreme method. This will have consequenc es for the nation whose gov ernment calls it the mother of democracy. There is no question that India has now eroded the meaning of the term ‘universal franchise’. Shani opens her book with these words, which bear reflection on today: “From November 1947 India em barked on the preparation of the first draft electoral roll on the basis of universal adult franchise. A handful of bureaucrats at the Secretari at of the Constituent Assem bly initiated the undertaking. They did so in the midst of the partition of India and Pakistan that was tearing the territory and the people apart, and while 552 sover eign princely states had yet to be integrated into India. Turning all adult Indians into voters over the next two years against many odds, and before they became citizens with the commencement of the constitution, required an immense power of imag ination. Doing so was India’s stark act of decolonisation. This was no legacy of coloni al rule: Indians imagined the universal franchise for them acted on this imaginary, and made it their political reality. By late 1949 India pushed through the frontiers of the world’s democratic imagi nation, and gave birth to its largest democracy.” (Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist)
