On 21st of February 2017 the city of Mumbai went to the polls to elect its 227 corporators who would represent the city's population in the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai.
By 9 AM on that day the following rich and famous celebrities had appeared on TV, displaying their ink-smeared forefingers as proud testimony of purportedly the holiest of civic duties that a citizen of the city can perform viz. voting in elections to elect public representatives: Sachin Tendulkar, Rekha, Zoya Akhtar, Ranveer Singh, John Abraham, Raj Thakeray, Sharad Pawar, Devendra Fadnavis, Kiran Rao et al.
On the same day the following routines also played out across the city.
Somewhere in the northern suburb of Kandivili a man woke up at 5 AM. He had to travel to Panvel to get to his job as an electrician. A 2.5 hour commute awaited him. He left home at 6 AM to reach work at 8:30 AM. The polling booths would open at 7:30. By the time he would get off work it would be 5:30 PM, exactly the time when the booths would close. As per the law his employers had to give him a 2 hour break to be able to vote. It was not enough time to make the 2.5 hour journey back to Panvel to vote. Meanwhile it is possible that Mr. Tendulkar probably rose at 6 AM, did the treadmill in his personal gym, had a hot shower and presented himself at the breakfast table while Mrs. Tendulkar instructed the bawarchi of Sir's gastronomical desire of the morning.
Somewhere in the North-eastern suburb of Mumbra a streetside hawker woke up at 4 AM in his 10x15ft slum tenement to line up to fill water at a common community tap. The water supply would start at 5 AM and last until 6 AM. After lugging back 5 buckets filled with water to his shanty, the man had to queue at the community toilet 200m away to relieve himself. He had to reach Fashion Street in Churchgate at 8 AM to open his stall as early as possible, so that he could return to Mumbra by 9 PM with the princely sum of approximately Rs. 400 which was his earning for the day - if it had been one of his good days. The election booth where he is registered would open at 7:30 AM and close at 5:30 PM. While the man was queueing up for water, Mr. Thackeray was presumably still asleep, having been certified by Mr. Pawar as a late riser. And why not! - his back-to-back meetings with his party lieutenants the previous night, predicting his party's seat projections in the elections must have sapped his strength.
At Prabhadevi a mother was woken up at 4:30 AM with the sound of her 5 year old son crying. The kid had a touch of fever. As the lady woke up, the rest of her day flashed across her mind's eye. She had to cook for her husband's lunch dabba, then take her son to the doctor 2 km away after which she would drop him at her mother-in-law's place. The doctor, the mother-in-law and the voting booth were in three different directions from her home. She needed to join all three dots and then rush to Dadar station so that she could reach her work place by 9:30, 30 minutes late. She works as a clerk in a bank. I leave it to your imagination as to what Kiran Rao was doing while this mother was walking the tightrope of a daily routine.
There is reason to believe that a large number of Mumbaikars do not vote because one or more parameters of the calisthenics of their daily routine went awry on election day. When required to choose between wages and an exalted civic duty, they choose the former.
The killing daily schedules that a majority of working Mumbaikars keep, are tenuous threads by which their existences hang. Every day several of these threads snap. Some are restored after a lot of pain and regression. Others are not, sending those hanging by them hurtling into an abyss of penury. Is it these precariously hanging lives that our celebrities pontificate to, when they appear on TV, immaculately dressed, well barbered, perfumed, brandishing their inked forefingers? Should we also expect them to point their inked fingers at their politician friends and tell them that maybe the voting percentage might be higher if those wretched souls had decent, free neighbourhood schools to send their children to, if they had a mass transit system which ferried them to their place of work within 45 minutes at no more than Rs. 5 a trip?
The more I think about it, the more it amazes me that 45% of Mumbaikars
always find time to stand in queues to cast their vote on election day. It
also puzzles me to no end when we call 45% a "low voter turnout" in a
city where at times it takes 45 minutes to make the trip from home to the nearest train station. And what awaits them as
a result of having discharged this most sacred of democratic
responsibilities? A grotesque status quo carefully constructed out of
perpetually dug up roads, a bus service which is as fickle as the English weather, and traffic snarls which render "rush" hours static.
So have a heart and applaud the citizens for not turning into Maoists. After you are done having a heart, pick your brain and think of the following.
Why do we assume that a 45% voter turnout is so low that it cannot reliably represent the collective wish of the people? So here's a statistical ponderable...
If 45% of voters register their votes in Mumbai Municipal Corporation elections then what is the probability that the same party would come in first position as would have come had 100% of voters registered their votes?
I am convinced that the probability would be very high. Good opinion polls get it right and their sample sizes are miniscule, maybe 0.001%. 45% voting is a sample of massive size. The result yielded by an election with 45% voting percentage is highly likely to be the same as with say a voting percentage of 70%.
Further, the voting percentage might be directly proportional to the unemployment rate. If one does not have a job, one will definitely go and vote to vent out one's frustration and also to feel important. Thus, a higher voting percentage in Mumbai may not necessarily be good news in all respects.
All in all, the voting percentage is in all likelihood a statistic which we don't really comprehend.
The undue importance accorded to the voting percentage manifests in bizarre ways. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court recently commented thus in court - “
One can’t blame the
government for everything. If a person does not cast his vote, then he
has no right to question the government.” (
http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/if-you-don-t-vote-you-have-no-right-to-blame-government-says-sc/story-1x94nFr2CwUFjUiclIhLcM.html)
I agree with the part that says "One can't blame the government for everything".
But I am stupefied with the statement "If a person does not cast his vote, then he
has no right to question the government.”
I thought every citizen of this country has the right to question/blame the government. So are we now seeing a redefinition of the "citizen" entity? The laws of the land are very explicit about who is a citizen and who isn't. But the honourable judge's proclamation leans towards hinting that anybody who does not vote does not qualify to be a citizen. I hope the learned judge said this in a fit of angst and did not really mean it. But behind his statement might be lurking a dangerous twist to the definition of citizenship. As it is the prevalent expectations out of all of us regarding patriotism make a lot of us uncomfortable. In that backdrop the judge's statement should worry us all. If people can get thrashed for not standing up for the national anthem, who knows what punishment might be meted out hereafter for not voting?
The huge focus on the "voting percentage" may not be as innocuous as it seems. To me it seems to be part of a larger and deliberate mindgame, a series of psychological tactics employed to perpetuate the oligarchy in our country.
For at least the past decade I have noticed that the administrators and elected representatives have been singing a new song which I call the "
Not us, but the apathy of the citizenry is responsible for the state of affairs" tune. While they sing this tune, celebrities pirouette around them like cheerleaders, sticking their forefingers smeared with ballot ink in the cameras. I wonder whether citizens understand that this is a deceitful pantomime act. I have my doubts because, after watching this show on TV, ordinary citizens themselves post images of their own ink-smeared forefingers on Whatsapp and Facebook. This year the carnival was draped in the Chief Minister's grandiose tweet - "
Thank you Mumbai for the record voting percentage and ... for participating in festival of democracy!" In this melee, it is very difficult to distinguish between cop and thief, predator and victim, guilty and guileless, wily and naive.
Let us recite some of the verses of the song referred to above. An Assistant Commissioner Of Police (ACP) was posted at the police station in my locality a few years ago. Nice person - articulate, amiable and engaging. He once took the initiative and held a citizens' meeting. The folks gathered there started complaining - "You need to get rid of the drug dealers and addicts in this locality. Vehicles travel in both directions on our one-way street." etc. The ACP was an astute man. While replying, he waved his burly arms in the manner of a person warmly embracing another and said, "We need your cooperation. Citizens and police should work together. You should provide us with information. If we work together, we can solve all your problems." Our ward officer of the Municipal Corporation advised us on similar lines - "You should form an Area Locality Management Committee. We should meet at the municipal ward office on every Saturday."
I have always grappled to come to terms with such exhortations. Are we supposed to work with public officials in addition to doing our jobs or running our businesses? As a measure of reciprocation, will government employees come and help us with our duties in our places of work?
The fact is that our administrators and elected representatives have graduated to a new level of audacious cunning. They have figured out the key to their survival. If I were in the business of selling alcohol, I would hope for 100% alcoholism in society. If I were in the business of selling smart phones, I would want to see 100% smart phone ownership within the population. Naturally, those whose prosperity is inextricably linked with the electoral process would aspire for 100% participation in it. If the voting percentage were to regularly drop, the country would be quick to question the relevance of the same. What would follow is replacement of the current process by an alternative, thereby leading to unemployment for the oligarchy that is currently firmly entrenched in the current system.
Put simply, Indian politics is a business in which the sellers sell their product and collect their payment once every five years. The product is never delivered. Little wonder that the salesmen and their propagandists put in a herculean effort to increase the participation of the guileless consumers in this business wherein the seller is designed to win at all times and the buyer is set up to lose at all times.
