Between Votebandi & Vote Chori: Decoding the Voter List 'Purification' Drive

The Bihar SIR experiment gives a new spin to Hindutva, bureaucracy, and 'jugaad'.

Rahul Gandhi might be unwittingly playing his part in the new Hindutva game, with his ‘vote chori’ allegations at the risk of becoming fuel for a nationwide SIR.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Home Minister Amit Shah gave a speech in Bihar the very next day after Rahul Gandhi held his ‘vote chori’ press conference. Shah did not respond to the allegations, and merely emphasised the importance of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in Bihar.

Notably, he called it a “purification” of the voter list—a key metaphor in upper casteist Hindutva thinking.

“Rahul Gandhi should stop this vote-bank politics. This voter list purification is not happening for the first time, your great grandfather Nehru had initiated it. Since you are losing election after election, you are giving excuses in advance for the Bihar polls,” he added.

The Hindutva Logic Behind Bureaucratic Spectacles

It is true that most things undertaken by right-leaning governments or regimes are not first carried out by them. What the right wing does is to give a qualitative spin to an already existing socio-legal device, making it more lethal, in a targeted manner, for specific groups. Thus, the Bihar SIR is not exactly like its predecessors; it is not just an ordinary revision of the electoral roll. It is part of the Hindutva war on the ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’, who are termed as the "termites" who need to be thrown out into the Bay of Bengal.

The grand actions taken by the successive National Democratic Alliance (NDA) governments—demonetisation, lockdown, NRC-CAA, and now the SIR—all have a purificatory logic that underlies their bureaucratic behemoth.

Just as earthly materials are lifted into the realm of divinity by Hindu mantras, the purificatory narratives behind these ordinary processes lift them into the grandness of Hindutva. They also double as coded messaging to their social base.

This indirect relaying, by which all the parties know what is being implicitly said, is an example of what anthropologist Edward T Hall calls ‘high-context communication’. The shared cultural and ideological understanding of the Hindutva community ensures that they’re all in on the act, without it ever being made an explicit order, demand, or call-to-arms. This baseline understanding, upon which the various Hindutva blocs act, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), can be called ‘purgatory populism’.

Purging the Undesirables

Purgatory populism can be understood in comparison to punitive or penal populism, which is a call for mobilisation on the promise of quick, efficient, and satisfying punitive justice.

Purgatory populism is more specific: it mobilises on the promise of a purge, of a cleansing of the social body of undesirables.

This notion of forcible, purificatory purging has outgrown its Christian origin to penetrate modern, non-Christian statecraft as well. The act got its name from the Pride’s Purge, which was incidentally conducted by the ‘Puritans’ in Medieval England. The Puritans themselves took it from the theological concept of Purgatory, a place that was supposed to purify souls and make them fit to enter heaven.

Purging was common in 20th century movements, both Christian and non-Christian; sometimes, they culminated in genocide. The 21st century populist tendencies have both mellowed and democratised this purgatory impulse in modern nations.

Purgatory populists run for elections on the promise of expelling infiltrators, and are often rewarded well by voters. On the slightly brighter side, the harshness of purging has come down a notch. It is far from benign, though.

The BJP’s purgatory populism is well-accepted—hence the minimal opposition to notebandi and the enthusiastic embrace of ‘tali bajao’. Votebandi too plays the same chord. The SIR, now being planned nationwide, was supposed to be an unbiased, constitutional exercise, with the Election Commission left to deal with it and the Central government and the BJP itself staying out of it.

But this official narrative is belied by the enthusiastic support for the revision among the BJP, the muted indifference towards it by NDA allies, and the blanket opposition to it by non-NDA parties.

Everyone knows what it means, but the BJP also knows that everyone knows.

NDA 3.0's Swing Toward Experimental Politics

Singular and maximalist pursuit of ideological goals is a luxury in politics: the BJP had this luxury in 2019, until COVID-19 came about, and it failed to win it back in 2024. Although the three BJP-led governments have been NDA, they’re obviously not all the same.

The first novelty in NDA 3.0 is that it has fully adopted an experimental approach to politics.

Experimental politics can perhaps be understood by taking a leaf out of Abhijith Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s book: the duo recommended an experimental approach to development economics, in which policies would be locally trialled, modified, scaled, and repeated according to the results.

A rule by experimentation, driven by a frustration with normal ways of administration and a penchant for special measures, has been part of the BJP’s behaviour over the past decade.

Their impromptu manoeuvres often demand and enforce a sacrifice by the ordinary people, all for getting rid of the undesirable from the social body.

The Crooked Road of Purgatory Movements

NDA 3.0, however, has even less of a plan than the previous two versions. “The road to terror”, as J Arch Getty and Oleg V Naumov write in their book on Stalinist purges, is “a crooked and winding track.” This flexibility of purgatory movements is often overlooked, and their temporary stalling seen as defeat. Often, a retreat is only to search for a better way around a hill, gorge or stream.

The Bihar SIR might just as well be a pilot study, based on which further plans would be drawn. This ‘governance by experiment’ approach means that the BJP itself does not fully know the outcome of its attempt, nor is it fully thought through.

Hence, the repeated changes in rules: first, they wanted everyone to give certificates, then some were excused, then only one certificate was needed; and hence, the surprise with which the state-level BJP itself was caught as the events unfolded over the past two months.

This iteration might even be a prelude to the more consequential SIR coming in West Bengal, which is seen as the hub of infiltrators, and ruled by a government voted to power by infiltrators.

'Jugaad' as a Governance Philosophy

Secondly, the BJP seems to have accepted that jugaad is how things are done in India. The grinding process of ‘getting things done’ in India can cut both ways: it is both a means of punishment and the means to safety. This jugaad bureaucracy is the actual, grassroot-level operation of the state, which cannot be perfected to precision. In jugaad-land, it is the process that matters, not the outcome.

With this understanding, the BJP has realistically realigned its goals. What the BJP now wants to portray is that it is the only party which sees and fights the nemesis of the infiltrator.

It doesn't matter how many are actually caught; and, so, the BJP's purge projects now have a radical autonomy from outcome. The point for the BJP is to keep its distinction—to say that they are the only force who have pledged to destroy an anti-national vote base that elects anti-national forces. The immediate coming together of all opposition parties on this issue only proved their point.

The Tale of Provincialising Hindutva

Thirdly, there is a devolution of Hindutva now—a sort of separation of powers in Hindu Rashtra.

Philosopher Theodor Adorno apparently used to quote a Jewish proverb which describes the world after the coming of the messiah: “The same as this one, only just slightly different.” Hindu Rashtra will be the same as constitutional India, only slightly different. The 2024 mandate has convinced the BJP that changing the constitution is not a feasible goal in the near term.

Instead, it seeks to tweak existing bodies so that a functioning democracy can exist within the framework of the Hindu Rashtra.

Thus, Amit Shah is able to delegate the task of purifying voter lists to the Election Commission, and that of Hindutva disciplining to state governments and state units of the BJP. There is a provincialising of key Hindutva processes, as unified nationwide acts are near impossible in the post-NRC era. Just as the state governments discovered their power to stall NRC, the BJP has realised the importance of such counterweights too.

This emerging separation of powers includes a role for the opposition parties too—they are to remain the permanent anti-national vestiges in the political scene, undertaking all pains to defend the enemies of the nation.

Rahul Gandhi might be unwittingly playing his part in the new Hindutva game, with his ‘vote chori’ allegations at the risk of becoming fuel for a nationwide SIR.

Moreover, the Opposition is expected to remain with the slogan “samvidhan khatre mein hai” (the Constitution is in danger), and never to declare that the Constitution is actually strong enough to withstand this onslaught. They seem happy to oblige. Overall, this balance of power is meant to keep the BJP safe until it can recover its majority mandate.

The Political Gamble: Public Patience or Backlash?

Which brings us to the final question: why does the BJP think that voters will not punish it for periodically subjecting them to the grind of the bureaucratic machinery? Perhaps the BJP knows something about the Indian people that escapes the rest of us, as they have shown time and again. Or, perhaps, they have pushed the patience of the enduring Indian people one time too many. The Bihar elections will give us a glimpse of the answer.

(Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at the School of Liberal Arts and Management Studies, PP Savani University, Surat. His research focuses on democratic forces in transitional polities. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)