Tomorrow I will vote. I’ll probably walk to the same mid-20th century bungalow that I walked to five years ago – it was once a primary school my daughter went to – where you vote in a room on the margins of the open space that was a playground. It is a site in which the ballot is cast (or the button pressed) in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Ballygunge in Kolkata. It has a historic serenity – even an optimism, given its immediate pedagogical past – that may not be typical at all of the circumstances of voting in India.
The general elections are, however, always largely orderly (“largely” being a crucial qualifier). This one hasn’t been very different in that regard. After I vote, I expect to receive an indelible ink mark that will stretch vertically on my forefinger from the cuticle to the skin below it; somehow, like a memory that was once all-important, it will fade after a few days. There have been stories about people who have managed to get the mark off; one of them, who voted eight times for the Bharatiya Janata party, was arrested.
But that’s among the shocking exceptions. Many have been displaying their marked forefingers on social media. The photo of the marked forefinger is an attempt to make the idea of change a material reality. It’s a victory in itself, and its triumph will last only until 4 June, when the results will be declared. Then a different kind of reality will, for better or worse, set in.
The elections began as long ago as 19 April, and are taking place in seven phases. I vote on the last day: 1 June. In a way, most of these elections have been – despite profound disappointments to do with the compromising of the Election Commission, which was set up in 1950 to ensure free and fair voting – a honeymoon period for free speech.
It was as if the voting period had granted a sort of immunity to people, journalists and opposition politicians, from the restrictive gaze on fundamental rights that has been the experience of Indians in the past five years. (Admittedly, Indians who criticise the government, and even the most law-abiding Muslims, feel the gaze more acutely than other Indians. But everyone has to be careful.) The elections, in comparison with the years preceding them, have been carefree. It’s as if the sense of process that the ballot comprises has re-energised the constitution and given people the sort of invincibility they would have in a free country.
The preamble to the elections was unsettling. On 16 February, the assets in the Congress party’s main bank accounts were frozen by the income tax department on the charge of non-payment of dues. On 21 March, Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and leader of the Aam Aadmi party, was arrested on money-laundering charges and jailed. On 22 March, the Delhi high court dismissed Congress’s appeal against the freezing of its assets.
It looked as though the elections were, in a sense, going to be shut down. It was noticeable from the BJP’s second term that the government was taking repressive measures in quick succession, and that its favoured instruments were the enforcement directorate and the income tax department. But then the supreme court granted Kejriwal bail. And the recoil and disgust against these measures reiterated with great force what many already knew was at stake in these elections: democracy.
This created a momentum of paradoxical hopefulness and resolve; this was when the photos of the marked forefinger began appearing on social media. And there seemed to be nervousness in the BJP’s ranks. A bizarre accusation made by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, against his billionaire friends and patrons, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, caught people’s attention. Why had Rahul Gandhi (the de facto leader of Congress) stopped criticising Adani and Ambani, the PM wanted to know. Was it because Congress had been sent “truckloads” of money by them? Modi offered no evidence to support these allegations (and neither Adani nor Ambani has publicly stated who they might support in the election). But the disarray they emerged from catalysed the democratic imagination.
Now, in the last days of voting, there’s fatigue again. The honeymoon is ending. Only the markets are disturbingly upbeat. Among the reasons for the onset of a pessimism of both the intellect and the will among pro-democracy groups is the behaviour of the Election Commission, for decades a robust body that has now been neutered, its commissioners handpicked by the government; its existence, many fear, something of a travesty. Are these elections really free? There was great disquiet when it became evident that the commission was beginning to release the figures for voter turnout late, and that there was a discrepancy between numbers noted by observers, which were smaller than the percentages announced by the commission.
The prime minister’s recent pronouncements, too, have been extraordinary. He has been sharing in interviews thoughts that have clearly preoccupied him: “When my mother was alive, I used to believe that I was born biologically. After she passed away, upon reflecting on all my experiences, I was convinced that God had sent me.” The timing of these “revelations” contains a premonition of a Third Coming, a third term in office. They are a self-proclaimed annunciation.
When the BJP and its allies returned to power in 2019, it was at 353 seats, with an emphatic majority, which the party took as a carte blanche for fully legitimising its project: a refashioning of the constitutional bases of the country and the workings of its institutions. The first term began with promises of a corruption-free economic boom and swiftly got taken over by religious paranoia. The second term’s message has been simple, especially in states such as Uttar Pradesh: we have been punishing Muslims, and we’ll punish you (individuals and institutions) too, if you aren’t with us.
However, this matter of being “with us” has been an intractable problem for the ruling party, as only 37% of the electorate voted for the BJP last time. It has tried to contain this problem through fear; as a result, there’s hardly an Indian today who’s apolitical. But politics – or the elections – is no longer about choosing between political parties. We’ve gone back to basics: we’re choosing between systems.
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, including Sojourn; his nonfiction works include Finding the Raga
