Stolen votes, unmoved voters

India's opposition has found a cause that outrages the capital but leaves the countryside shrugging. Its problem is less the Election Commission than itself

On October 10th police waded into journalists, students and activists who had gathered at Jantar Mantar, a protest ground in Delhi, to demand the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the chief election commissioner. They also wanted an end to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, which the opposition says is a means of striking inconvenient voters off the list. The government responded by denotifying Jantar Mantar as a place to protest. Congress responded by vowing to take it back. A day of brutality has given the opposition its best publicity in a while. Will it matter at the ballot box?

Ajay Gudavarthy, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, is doubtful. In a long interview with G. Sampath on In Focus, he argues that "vote chori" (vote theft) is still an issue for the educated and the urban. The young protesters he credits with politicising it number a couple of thousand. In the villages and small towns he visits, from Telangana to Haryana, people see it as a quarrel between parties. Even voters who suspect some malpractice, he says, will not simply hand their consent to the opposition.

The abstraction problem

Part of the trouble is language. Talk of the Election Commission's autonomy, the separation of powers and executive overreach is "too abstract" for most Indians. Rahul Gandhi's constitutional rhetoric took off only once it was tied to something concrete: reservations. Nobody, Mr Gudavarthy says, has made the same translation for the electoral rolls. The case that would work is that the vote is how citizens keep a government answerable on prices and jobs, and that BJP wants it weakened so as to insulate itself from those demands. Opposition leaders, he says, have "squarely failed" to say so.

They may be unable as well as unwilling. Most parties, he notes, offer no alternative to the neoliberal consensus on employment, so linking the vote to livelihoods invites an awkward question: what would you do differently? Congress governments in Karnataka and Telangana face the same complaints as BJP ones, over land, pollution and joblessness. The party's own reforms after Manmohan Singh, he adds, damaged the sense of collective welfare that it now invokes.

Missing millions

The numbers are enormous but strangely silent. Deletions have been cited at 27 lakh, then 90 lakh in Bengal and now 13 crore. Where, Mr Gudavarthy asks, are these people? A crore on the streets would jam the country, yet the protests are of opposition politicians against the BJP, with neither the commission nor the deleted in the picture.

He offers two charitable explanations. One is that protest is a privilege the poor cannot afford. The other is uncomfortable: by some assessments more than 80% of those removed are Muslims and Dalits. Parading them would hand BJP the polarisation it wants ahead of 2029, when it hopes to consolidate OBC and upper-caste votes against them. Hiding them undermines the campaign's credibility. It is, Mr Gudavarthy says, the kind of catch-22 the BJP and its ideological parent, the RSS, have spent a decade setting for the opposition: damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Belonging, bought and sold

Behind the tactical errors lies a deeper one. Hindutva, he argues, offers something the opposition does not: a sense of belonging, rooted in civilisational memory, in a fluid and anxious world. Fifteen years in opposition has not produced a rival. "Constitutional India" stirs Dalits through the symbolism of Ambedkar, but many Dalit homes display Ambedkar on one wall and Hindu gods on another. Mr Gandhi's flirtation with Shiva has not connected, perhaps, Mr Gudavarthy suggests, because the opposition's leaders are second- and third-generation politicians while Mr Modi pairs cultural pride with an anti-elitist pitch.

His aphorism: people vote populist for the right reasons, and populists mobilise them for the wrong ones. Voters want anti-elitism, belonging and inclusion. Until the opposition joins a social-democratic offer to a cultural one, he says, it will merely play within Hindutva's field.

Heroes and structures

The protest's own design draws criticism. Focusing on one man's resignation is emotive but fragile: when Dharmendra Pradhan quit as education minister, the anger over exam failures dissipated although the system was unchanged. Left groups raise structural demands, such as abolishing the National Testing Agency, but these rarely become the mainstay of a movement. Electoral politics, he says, rewards the showy. In Telangana, Gurukul schools costing around 200 crore rupees each are built as flagships, though the same money could repair some 1,000 ordinary government schools.

Ideology fares no better when it floats free of experience. Mr Gandhi's attacks on the Manusmriti or on the RSS as fascist leave unclear what a woman suffering domestic violence would gain. The model, Mr Gudavarthy says, is Mahatma Gandhi, who turned the abstraction of sovereignty into a tax on salt.

A new politics, an old script

The Gen Z protesters, in his telling, are doing something fresh: using humour and what he calls "disengaged mockery" to deflate a demagogue's gravitas, and drawing Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, rich and poor together. He likens it to Paris in 1968 and calls it India's "third democratic upsurge". Neither the BJP nor the opposition, he says, is ready for it. Parties, centralised and strategic, are ill-suited to leaderless energy, though he thinks they remain indispensable and need a change of culture, away from "gatekeeping and networking".

Protest itself has grown predictable. Announce Jantar Mantar in advance and the state can seal it. He would rather see protests scattered across the country, as in the Telangana movement, when every district had its own action committee.

Two Indias

The harder question is why a crisis so obvious to some is so little felt by others. Mr Gudavarthy's hypothesis, which he plans to test in a survey in Uttar Pradesh, is that BJP and RSS keep two Indias apart: an urban, loud "India" where crisis is discussed, and a rural "Bharat" where welfare is delivered, administration works and the RSS has reach into the household. In Haryana, after the farmers' protests, a Dalit family told him that only those with money and time could sit at dharnas for two years; the movement was recast as Jats against the rest. Some dissent, he suspects, is even channelled by the BJP so that opposition talk of crisis sounds like a bid for power. He is careful to disown conspiracy talk of a BJP "B team".

Voters, he insists, are not dupes. BJP lost Ayodhya, and Mr Modi trailed in Varanasi. The anti-Muslim feeling that polarises is strongest among caste Hindus and a cloistered urban middle class; in public spaces he has watched Hindu and Muslim respondents sit side by side, disagreeing amicably.

Why, then, does the BJP bother with rigging? Mr Gudavarthy thinks it is more psychology than necessity. A leadership built on infallibility, rattled by falling to 240 seats, feels it must win everywhere. It is strong enough on culture not to. Painting the campaign as an elite Delhi fuss might even help the party.

The impasse

His prescription is stark. Majoritarianism cannot be broken without breaking the neoliberal consensus. The opposition would have to promise big-ticket change in education, health and jobs, and worry later about corporate funders who are not keen. Mr Modi has exhausted the politics of optics; to out-perform him at it is to play second fiddle. Voters, meanwhile, are keeping the opposition on probation, which Mr Gudavarthy reads as a sign of maturity. For a movement that wants to save the vote, it is a reminder that voters have to be persuaded too.

Source: an In Focus interview between G. Sampath and Ajay Gudavarthy. The views are the interviewee's.