An Election of Silences

A democracy is rule based on conversation – on ideas, arguments, and decisions taken after discussion. At no time is this more evident than during elections, when various parties and politicians publicly argue their case and ask the electorate to support them, and yet the current Indian elections are full of gaping holes.

There are large silences that nobody seems to want to disturb.

At least 4.9 million Indians will not vote in this election. This is not because of voter suppression, or any mistake by our Selection Commission – apologies, Election Commission – but because they are dead. This is the number that most, including the former chief economic adviser to the Narendra Modi government, Arvind Subramanian, estimate died during the pandemic. That is approximately 9,000 people per constituency that will elect a Member of Parliament for the next Lok Sabha. Most likely some would have been too young to vote in this election anyway, but now they never will.

We do not talk about the dead that piled up all around us as the government went into hiding, its only contribution being prohibiting photography of constantly burning pyres, or stealing the shrouds from the corpses along the Ganga. We do not talk of the largest forced migration since Partition. We do not talk of the millions of labourers, cut off from work, forgotten by a callous government that ordered a countrywide shutdown in four hours and with no preparation and left people with nothing to live on. We do not talk of the trains that ran over the exhausted migrants, unwanted in their own country, as they caught sleep on railway tracks.

More than two years after the massive self-inflicted wound that was our pandemic response there is no real change. Our expenditure on healthcare remains abysmal, and there has been no change in our economic structure. We still rely on exploiting labour displaced by economic need or natural tragedy, chew them up, and spit them out. In the next pandemic, we will likely deal with them as we did the last time – brutally and without a shred of empathy or compassion. 

We do not talk of that other sudden lockdown either, in Kashmir, when we decided to strip the last vestiges of anything approaching democracy – or our own legitimacy – in a vaudeville farce, and simultaneously shut down any communication across the length and breadth of the Kashmir Valley. Even now, so many years later, with so many claims of “normalcy” and “development” and all the other useless buzzwords, the government fears the reality so much that not one foreign journalist has been allowed to report from there. 

But then Kashmir has been an old wound, that is where our liberalism, our democracy, and any pretence to decency goes to die. We do not talk about it, and our silence is the most obvious indictment of our complicity, and lack of moral will. For a nation that prides itself on having won its freedom on the back of satyagraha, of the force of truth, all we have is force, and truth is not welcome.

And now we have a new wound to ignore, the festering war-like situation nurtured and supported in Manipur, with thousands upon thousands displaced, murder and rape, and a whole state divided along communal lines. It has been a whole year and more, and just like the injustices and horrors we have ignored in Kashmir, as each day passes, we pay it less attention, as if a wound heals by itself, as if silence is anything else but tacit approval to the cruel and murderous.

We have grown comfortable ignoring these things, trained ourselves to look away from lynchings, murders and calls for genocide. Like two of Gandhi’s monkeys, we see no evil and hear no evil, and in a wonderful evolution of the third – never, ever speak against evil. In a remarkable transformation after more than 75 years of independence we have become the most docile of colonised subjects, neither able or willing to even speak the truth, much less fight for it. 

In the end, who wins this election – or is crowned in this selection – matters little. A king or queen is only a fool with a sceptre, as we proved to the British a long time ago. What matters is the people, and I fear we have become a people where all we have to offer in the face of the greatest of atrocities, to the deaths of millions, is only silence.