By Nilotpal Basu
Pablo Neruda’s immortal lines read thus: “You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming”. These words were the ultimate declaration of the inevitability of collective triumph of the people for a cause worthy of humanity and civilisation. What started as a struggle to salvage electoral democracy, an essential element of our republican constitution from an obnoxious assault on the right to vote has developed into one of the biggest battles for democracy in contemporary India.
It was not accidental that the struggle to restore the voting rights of citizens who suffered an exercise at mass disenfranchisement through the Special Intensive Revision of the voters’ lists initiated by the Election Commission of India last year. The sheer scale of deletions of legitimate voters who were presumptive citizens has doubtless added a golden chapter in the people’s concern for democracy. The history of struggle for democracy in India predates our freedom and the story of fighting the British colonial rule.
Even after the establishment of the Constitution, Indian people have been relentless in defence of democracy, including that during the infamous Emergency of 1975. Perhaps the fiercest face of that struggle continues in the shadows of a neo-fascist regime which is attempting to redraw the very contours of our citizenship. The attempt is to redefine citizenship along Hindutva lines and replace our multinational, multi-religious, multi-cultural democracy with the straitjacket of a citizenship implicitly tied to religious identity.
It is obvious that such an effort would involve the hollowing out of the foundational basis of our democratic, secular, federal, republic. The purported linkage to Hindutva was aimed at transforming a ‘unity in diversity’ landscape into the graveyard of majoritarian straitjacket. Being a people of modern orientation and the aspirations of building a modern forward looking democracy, the nature of our democratic experience also needed to be dovetailed to changes. Hence, constant revision of our electoral rolls has been the order that has guided our electoral system.
But this time around, SIR intended to force a paradigm shift. It attempted to accommodate the bogey of large-scale infiltration and embark on a mission to purge ‘non-citizens’. This has led to this huge catastrophe staring at our face where more than 13 crore citizens were about to lose their constitutional right to vote. That this threat was real was clear from 27 lakh citizens in West Bengal being disallowed from voting.
These columns of People’s Democracy have chronically documented the method, the wrongdoings and the outright statutory violations. It has also exposed Gyanesh Kumar’s coup to hijack the Constitutional empowerment which he tried to misuse. Once these deviations were identified, it provoked the widest possible opposition and the ultimate resistance. This was not just for salvaging the right to vote, but the essence of multi-party democracy in India. Gyanesh Kumar’s methods have been so crude that his manner of exercise of power underline unilateralism, lawlessness and betrayed signs of remote political control.
The might of the Indian state was sought to be tailored to ensure Gyanesh Kumar’s coup against our democratic setup. The mainstream media’s efforts to put a lid on the obnoxious developments ultimately cracked. With every passing day during the last one and a half years of the ongoing SIR exercise, the conspiracy against Indian democracy and people’s right to vote came out in the open.
What is worth noting is that very important sectors of our society have all rallied in this battle. A very important role has been played by the young people, now more commonly referred to as GenZ, who have not in the distant past displayed their collective strength on the issue of corruption in the education sector. The legal fraternity had launched a life and death battle to salvage the constitution and its provisions for ensuring democracy and fundamental rights.
The entire mainstream media which has come to be virtually captured by corporate giants, engaged in a crony relationship with the political leadership of BJP-RSS. But the independent media operating in social media space through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube platforms have managed to put up a formidable show of exposing the truth. These are the new features in our current battle for democracy. The young people also contributed through their typical generational expressions of memes, cartoons, music, sarcastic skits and so on to challenge the government’s narrative. The brilliant investigative journalism of Indian Express was the final nail in the coffin to put Gyanesh Kumar and the Government on the dock.
This has turned the tide, and the protest actions could not be challenged, let alone stopped by fake narratives. The huge preparations for mass action in Jantar Mantar, starting on October 10, saw one of the worst barbarities unleashed by the Union government using the police and the security forces as goons. This was perhaps the first time that there was such large-scale use of RSS and its affiliated organisations in plain clothes acting in tandem with the security forces to silence the protestors. The perverted attitude towards young women protestors and journalists was also one of the reprehensible features of the current official response.
Stopping protestors by withdrawing metro services and long distance trains, border checks, even police going to far off locations to dissuade potential participants were ample testimony that the ruling dispensation did not believe in the right to peaceful protest and the essence of Article 19 which guarantees free speech and public assembly.
But ultimately, all those draconian attempts came to a naught when the combined INDIA platform saw a sea of people marching towards the Supreme Court to present a new petition for the removal of Gyanesh Kumar and the stoppage of SIR. This was the first time that 40,000 Delhi Police and security forces drawn from multiple agencies did not venture to confront. It seems that early signs of the writing on the wall are becoming visible. Meanwhile in West Bengal, where the SIR’s fault lines were most explicit, a special drive has been launched for enlisting voters who were left out in the earlier phases. However, the government is not ready to completely give up and is denying allowing Jantar Mantar as the designated protest site.
But a mere shift will not suffice. SIR will have to be frozen, and the impact of the malafide actions will have to be rolled back. This will go a long way in taking the battle forward for salvaging democracy from the people who launched the entire exercise. Authors of the ‘detect, delete, deport’ drive must be brought to book. No doubt flowers have been cut, but the arrival of spring has to be assured. (IPA Service)
