The growing controversy about the manipulation of electoral rolls goes beyond elections. While it may be aimed at winning elections, the strategy itself emanates from the underlying political philosophy of Hindutva.
The allegations of roll manipulation did not exist in the first two terms of the Modi government but they have grown louder in his third term, after the results in Maharashtra. In a sense, this marks a shift from the hay-days of Hindutva hegemony to a faltering support base. How it will manage the new situation is a story of wheel-within-the-wheels.
What we are set to witness in the coming days is contempt for consent. While the majoritarian psyche talks about the rule of the majority, it in essence empathises with none. In effect, contempt for consent calls the bluff on Hindu unity. There is no empathy for the Hindus here, because it does not respect the opinion of the majority of Hindu voters.
Further, this also calls into question the social character of Hindutva being essentially of the caste Hindus and other dominant castes. As recent reports from Bihar show, even the upper castes are anxious about their vote but the Hindutva juggernaut will not stop short of completing the revision. In essence, under Narendra Modi's leadership, Hindutva is about a crude power game. It boils down to a small coterie reflecting more like a mafioso style of functioning that eventually excludes most on the basis of distrust.
Vote or Suffer: The BJP’s Delhi Model
Second, the electoral roll exclusion also reflects the retributive character of Hindutva politics. Those who are not likely to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) need to be excluded. While Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is equated with National Register of Citizens (NRC), it is not about only excluding the Muslims but all those castes that are less likely to vote for the BJP, including the Dalits.
Under the new strategy of the BJP, Muslims and Dalits are the projected targets in order to consolidate the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the caste Hindus in favour of the BJP, even as it will attempt to exclude the Muslims and Dalits from the electoral rolls.
Retributive politics of the BJP was insidiously visible in the way it handled Delhi and eventually managed to come to power. People of Delhi had to suffer due to the constant intervention of the Lieutenant-Governor (LG) blocking files and disallowing the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government from working smoothly.
Since the BJP coming to power, the LG is out of the news. The alternative BJP presented before the people of Delhi is to either suffer the retributive action or vote the BJP to power, so that the Centre in cooperation with the state government can provide better governance.
Chief Minister Rekha Gupta accordingly recently commented that Delhi will transform now because from the Centre, State and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, all have a common goal now. The benevolent and benign governance is preceded by retributive threats and people need to fall in line, if they don’t wish to suffer.
It is also a comment on the Opposition, that people don’t seem to have enough reasons to put up with the suffering if another party, even if at a gun-point, offers equal or better service-delivery mechanism. It is the same retributive action that is visible in deleting potential voters that may not vote for you.
You are a suspect unless you prove yourself otherwise.
Suspicion of the Poor
Finally, at the heart of the deletion is suspicion of the poor. The same contempt exemplified against the poor in the rhetoric of illegal immigrants will also get extended in Bihar, to its countless immigrants living outside of Bihar.
Migrants suffered during the lockdown walking thousands of killometers in order to survive; now it is a struggle to survive politically. The same suspicion of the poor was demonstrated during the implementation of demonetisation. It shifted the onus unto the poor, just as electoral revision has shifted the onus unto the voter to produce their documents. There is no onus on the EC that an eligible voter might drop off the list. The ruled have to become atmanirbhar (self reliant), and the ruler enjoys power without accountability.
Naming suffering and the grievances of the poor for long now has been discredited as an anti-national activity.
The contempt and suspicion of the poor was in-built to the Hindutva variant of nationalist discourse. It discredits India. Much the same way as genuine complaints about malnutrition and poor primary education became a frontal attack on Gujarati asmita (identity) during the Modi tenure.
One can only conclude by also calling out the failure of the Opposition parties in converting the violations into mass political issues. Are the current violations based on the inability of the Opposition parties to mobilise street protests and convert the grievances into electoral outcomes? This lacuna seems to be both organisational and ideological.
The Lost Cause of Opposition
Ideally, Opposition parties should have hit the streets when the Chief Justice was removed from the committee to select the Chief Election Commissioner. They slept over it. They treated it more as an administrative issue than a political one. This inability to mobilise gives strength to the ruling party and forces the Opposition parties to rely more and more on the judiciary, which is itself reeling under the majoritarian weight and could well be endorsing a greater part of that imagination.
What is hurting the Opposition parties even more is their inability to create effective narratives. The opposition parties either criticise the Election Commission for 'killing democracy' or produce counter-factual statements of who will be dropped off the list. They are unable to effectively communicate and create a narrative as to how the BJP is guided by a systematic philosophy in why it does what it does.
Opposition parties are unable to dent the credibility of Modi because they do not have an effective counter-cultural narrative to the dynamics of Hindu unity that Modi mostly rests on.
An effective narrative has to wedge-open this image. Opposition remains an outlier to the Hindu discourse. As long as they fear a backlash in speaking out against and linking the multifarious decisions by the Modi government to its grand claims of Hindu empowerment, the Opposition will continue to falter.
Opposition parties could well have linked the manipulation of the electoral rolls to the empty rhetoric of Hindu unity because the majority excluded will be Hindus, alongside the Muslims. The very need to win with manipulation shows the faltering self-claimed Hindu hegemony of PM Modi.
Hindutva is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be countered through evidence, facts, and critiquing administrative decisions of Constitutional bodies. It needs an effective story of greater moral efficacy. Moral efficacy is not produced by facts but when those facts are effectively linked to everyday life and questions of identity, dignity and survival.
(Ajay Gudavarthy is a political theorist, analyst, and columnist in India. He is associate professor in political science at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)