Khamosh is an Urdu term for silence and taciturnity. Yesterday, Lucknow went to the polls for the ongoing UP state elections - and while the papers today report a record turnout of 53% in my constituency (Lucknow central), that is exactly what the elections felt like around here: they were a silent and tacit affair, both audibly and visibly (as the picture of an otherwise busy intersection demonstrates, taken yesterday). Given the image of UP politics as the core of Indian democracy - vibrant, rowdy, and exorbitant - this is really surprising. What happened? This post tries to give a first, unfiltered response.
On election day itself, the answer is simple: nothing much happened, really. Yes, people went to their polling booth, politicians took a break, police officers enjoyed the sun, children let their kites fly high - and scholars like me were busy being puzzled. More puzzling than the khamosh polling day were, however, the silent weeks ahead. Of course, the media was full of buzz, with all the indecisive factors in this election: will Mayawati stay in office? Most likely not. Will the Samajwadi Party return or fade away forever? Most likely it will return. Is there a Rahul Gandhi factor? Yes. What is it? No idea. Similarly: is there a Anna Hazare factor? Yes. What is it? Nobody knows. And on and on and on...
But on the streets of Lucknow, we saw very few banners, the cracking loudspeaker cars of earlier Indian elections remained absent with the exception of the last few days only, and many people I spoke to couldn't be bothered. Candidates roamed around on buffaloes rather than on a proper UP Neta's string of at least 40 SUVs. There were not really any scandals, if we discount the funny episode about Salman Khurshid and Muslim reservation (for details of what happened see here, here and here). And after a couple of weeks into this poll "battle", I began to wonder: why do I not see anything of what I expected to see in a UP political contest? Why stems my knowledge exclusively from the media? And why do even candidates I spoke to seem so business-as-usual?
Struck by this irony, I began to ask people, I spoke at length with a Rickshaw puller on my way home, chatted with neighbours, and cross-questioned other observers of Lucknow and UP at large. The Rickshaw puller was as confused as I am, and confided that he does not even know who the candidates are this time (he doesn't read any papers - he can't - and there were only few posters to guide him). The observers felt incapable of making any predictions - not just because of the complicated array of factor alluded to earlier, but also because they found it hard to gauge actual power balances in the absence of visible power plays on the streets. And my middle-class neighbours? Many of them were just happy - politics is a nuisance in their eyes, anyway.1
But then on the other hand: record voter turnout! Politicized youngsters! Excited media! Web 2.0 campaigning for the first time! These elections were clearly not less intense - but they were quite different, nonetheless: they were khamoshi, tacit, invisibly and rarely audible.2 To pick up newspaper terminology: they were "clean" at last. One reason for this state of affairs is of course the election commission's tough stance and this year's model code of conduct, which even I broke once. This time, the EC did not only try to curb criminal practices such as vote buying, but also censored political ideas which it considers out of tune with their very own "clear politics" drive. But what puzzles me is why this toughened stance - which simply bans most of the many creative ways in which Indian politicians used to campaign in the past - worked. Why did all the political bigwigs bow down and follow the ban? Why this time, but not earlier? Or in other words: how did the EC become so immensely powerful?
A partial and preliminary answer to this question can be derived, I would like to suggest, by contextualizing the role of the EC within wider middle class politics, judicial activism, and "cleanliness" in the wake of the Anna Hazare movement (on which I can only repeatedly recommend Pankaj Mishra's piece in the New York Review of Books). Maybe we need to understand the leaders' and parties' unparalleled allegiance to the EC as an expression of their deep insecurity after the surprising upsurge of India against Corruption? Maybe they just didn't want to risk to insist on actual politics in the context of last year's events?
Like India against Corruption - which took a good cause to unhealthy extremes - the EC is however in danger, I would argue, to turn their "clean elections" agenda into an abolishion of politics per se: if one is not allowed to let the power plays come out, if one is not even allowed to make promises to the electorate or stick to one's own agenda, how exactly is democracy supposed to function? Of course one wants to do away with uncomfortable political opinions (casteism, communalism, you name it) - but will these cease to exist and cease to impact elections just because they are banned? All that newspapers have to say now about the various candidates is their monthly income and wether they have a criminal record or not - important aspects, no doubt, but not as important as the question what these candidates want and how they want to get there.
The wider consequence of this imposed khamoshi thus seems to be a solid depoliticization of elections. And since issues don't disappear just because they are banned, the consequence is also to drive "dirty politics" underground.3 If Anna Hazare remained silent on wider issues of political economy by focussing solely on corruption (see my critique here), seeing politics as a nuisance to be cleaned up arguably ignores what politics are all about: power play!
But then, contradictions remain nonetheless - above all in the form of the highest turnout for state elections in Lucknow since decades. Khamoshi seemed to have worked in re-politicizing people - quite contrary to my argument. A puzzling dialectic, which renders this blog post somewhat tentative - I would thus be very happy for comments below on how to sort this out further. How did the EC become so powerful? And what are the consequences thereof?
- 1. Of course, there are exceptions - both principled and self-interested ones - but "nuisance" nonetheless remained the most frequent term for elections I heard around here...
- 2. At least in Lucknow, I should be careful not to overstate my point.
- 3. The latter fact was quite evident in recent Shia-Sunni clashes in old Lucknow, for instance - of which everybody knew they were related to elections, but nobody - certainly no journalist - pointed out how precisely the link works...
February 21, 2012 - 15:59 — punam pandey
EC has become powerful because the political parties had vulgarised the election so much that when Mr. T. N. Seshan adopted tough posture to enforce model code of conduct effectively, he became hero in India. Mr. Seshan was so successful because of unblemished record. The legacy has been passed on to next generation of CESs and ECs. But sad thing is that all usual corrupt practices have not stopped, rather nature have changed. In this part of world, if one good policy or practice is mandated to be followed, ten ways are devised to break them.
Just wait and watch.
February 21, 2012 - 16:15 — Raphael Susewind
So this EC activism is indeed not as recent as I believed? After all TN Seshan was early nineties, if I am correct? I had the impression that in the late 90s early 2000s still parties did not care very much... Anyway: do you know if the EC already censored certain opinions that early, too (such as caste appeal etc - after all it was the "second democratic upsurge" etc pp)?
February 22, 2012 - 06:05 — Shvetal Vyas
I’m still thinking about this. For me, imagining a quiet election is difficult. When I was growing up, most middle-class people I knew thought of elections and politics as ‘nuisance’, and a lot of people I talk to in India today too want it to be unobtrusive – give them a good infrastructure, opportunities to make and spend money, and then get out of the way. So that comment does not surprise me.
What I’m thinking about are the causes – neither T.N. Seshan nor Anna Hazare make sense. I disagreed with the Anna Hazare movement, but discovered that there were some friends in Delhi who took all criticism of the movement to heart. I ended up losing at least one friend on the issue, so I do know that it did become powerful culturally, but I never thought that it was powerful enough to drown out election practices. Elections in India have always been a ‘masala’ entertainment, a ‘circus’, a ‘tamasha’. While some of these epithets are often used disparagingly in the media, I remember elections fondly, as a regular means of debating issues that otherwise you can debate only with a select few, who enjoy politics as much as you do.
That’s my two cents. I don’t really have anything more profound to say, except agreeing with you that if this becomes a permanent feature, it will be disappointing and eliminate a certain way of being political. At the same time, I’m optimistic. Come a general election, things may become raucous again!
February 22, 2012 - 06:07 — Raphael Susewind
Your comment (thanks for it) made me think whether we see the cultural effect of India against Corruption turning into a political effect in an unexpected way: not in terms of an actual politicization of the middle classes - but in terms of a pre-emptive de-politicization of the political classes (my earlier "parties are insecure and dont want to risk a middle class backlash" argument). I bet you disagree?
February 22, 2012 - 06:08 — Shvetal Vyas
I don’t disagree. I accept that a depoliticization of the political classes is happening. Another question to ask here is – what exactly does it mean to be depoliticised? There are certain forms of aggressive campaigning that have disappeared, but certain forms of aggression will remain an integral part of the Indian civil society – aggression against minorities and working class, for instance. The politicians will continue to be aggressive about those things, because they do not risk a middle class backlash there, but will actually derive support from being as anti-working class, anti-union, anti-minorities as they can be. Do correct me if I’ve understood your argument incorrectly. You’re talking about how elections happen, i.e. the form, the possible reason for those changes, and then about how changes in form influence content. My argument would be that the form may change, but major change in content is not taking place.
February 22, 2012 - 06:19 — Raphael Susewind
Very true. I would actually go one step further and wonder if the stability in content might not be a function of the changing form? I think it would be worthwhile to see whether the anti-poor agenda in terms of content is sustained by depolicized political forms? By portraying a technocratic polity, for instance, one naturally crowds out and silences those who are less educated (and thus can't join the technocratic smalltalk) or are less willing to campaign in coffee table book format. One silences those who bring up caste feelings, for instance, not because they like being casteist - but to the contrary precisely because they are the victims of everyday casteism from above (even if that might be clad in anti-poor terms).
Apart from this dialectic of form and content, however, I would also maintain that depoliticization in itself remains a political move. Even if your form might turn technocratic, this is itself a political statement. You can't evade being political. And - to return to my original post - you can't ban it either...
February 22, 2012 - 06:31 — Shvetal Vyas
I totally agree. I usually rail against arguments that see form and content as separate, and I argue for them being constitutive of each other. And I agree with the "can neither evade nor ban the political" sentiment.
February 22, 2012 - 20:59 — H R Venkatesh Rao
1. For me the election was noisy, that's because we in the newsroom got only what was filtered to us. I do know however that it was ghostly mostly for the people of UP.
2. Political parties are also fed up of the death of the 'festival of democracy'. They are thinking about stripping the election commission of its powers. Elections will return to being the noisy affair they once were in a few years, be sure of it.
February 23, 2012 - 05:41 — Raphael Susewind
Though the sad thing, Venk, is probably that the parties are not only interested in getting politics back from the EC - but also the opportunity to bribe and coerce... That would be too much of a rollback of course. Lets see what happens...
March 29, 2012 - 16:11 — Andrew Wyatt
A very interesting post. Madurai was also very quiet on polling day in the 2011 assembly elections in TN and the preceding campaign quite low key. Posters were banned and wall paintings defaced to satisfy the Election Commission. However the strictures did not apply to television. The big parties got very friendly coverage from the satellite channels than lean towards them. Also a lot of money was spent placing advertisements in newspapers.
March 31, 2012 - 07:30 — Raphael Susewind
Thanks for the hints, Andrew - interesting to get perspectives from elsewhere on this. I have no idea about television (don't own one), but there were certainly full-page adverts in the local papers. And, allegedly, quite some paid-for coverage in editorials and news reports, too. Clearly, the media was in full election swing - which would kind of support my middle-class "clean politics" suspicion: those who can read were able to inform themselves...