The Cockroach Janta Party has managed to combine “two sources of public anger”, the conduct of exams and the conduct of the SIR, wrote Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his Indian Express column of 10 October. These two issues, Mr Mehta argues, have produced “a singular crisis of public trust”, one that now extends to the Election Commission of India (ECI) as well. Yet he offers no fact to prove it, only assertion. He uses the phrase “crisis of trust” five times, in one form or another. Repetition is not evidence.
The protest, he argues, is partly “a consequence of the Court not safeguarding the constitutive rules of democracy”. The solution he offers is remarkable. One of India’s top political scientists says the Supreme Court can “reverse its previous rulings” on the SIR and on the “mode of selection of Election Commissioners”. He concedes this is unlikely. He plainly wishes otherwise. The Court upheld the SIR only in May. On appointments, it has not yet decided whether the 2023 law is valid; after a split verdict last month, the question awaits a larger bench. In short, Mr Mehta wants the apex court to reverse its decisions, one of them not yet made, because of street pressure.
Going a step further, he writes that the Election Commission and the government can recover their credibility only “through resignations of the relevant officials”. I ask: why? Because one side can fill the streets? Consider the figure behind the anger. The Opposition says some 13 crore voters have been removed. The ECI says the number refers to names flagged at the draft stage, not final deletions: roughly 2.8 crore dead, 6.3 crore permanently shifted, 3 crore absent or untraceable, and nearly 1 crore registered in more than one place. Critics dispute the explanation, and it can be tested in court. That is how institutions are supposed to work.
A resignation demanded before the courts have ruled is not accountability. It is a verdict delivered by the crowd.
Here is a simple test, Mr Mehta. If the case against the SIR holds water, bring not 13 crore but 1 per cent of them, 13 lakh genuine voters wrongly struck off, before the Supreme Court. The Court has opened its doors at midnight before; for 13 lakh disenfranchised citizens, it surely would again. Until someone does, the crisis remains an assertion.
The ballot fares no better. Should the government hold Uttar Pradesh, he warns, “it will claim its popular authority has been restored”. Note the word claim. A win at the polls, he implies, would merely be the government’s “electoral machinery” reasserting itself. So when people gather at Jantar Mantar, society is speaking; when they queue at a polling booth, they are being processed. Heads the protest wins; tails the voters were misled.
Mr Mehta calls the protesters’ demands “reasonable”. How is it reasonable to demand the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation over a claim the Commission has answered and the courts have yet to settle? Ask him, and he points to “the sight of young people trying to craft a democratic future”. But one fails to understand how a democratic future can be crafted by making its institutions surrender.
His claim that the CJP has “stayed resolutely non-violent and non-coercive” suggests he has not followed this movement closely. During its Chalo Sansad march on 20 July, thousands of supporters tried to breach police barricades as they marched on Parliament, in defiance of a ban on gatherings. Delhi Police have since filed 15 cases, and one FIR accuses members of the crowd of throwing stones at officers. The police answered with tear gas and lathis, and people on both sides were injured. A movement whose last march on Parliament ended this way can hardly be called resolutely non-violent, and the authorities had reason to be wary before granting it Jantar Mantar again.
What struck me most was the sheer activism with which he wishes for “more people turning out”. He writes: “This is important for those who care about these causes.” But Dharmendra Pradhan resigned in July, and the CJP itself said the government had accepted all its demands. The exams half of his crisis has been answered. The SIR itself has been to the Supreme Court, which upheld it. Why, then, should “those who care about these causes” turn out, Mr Mehta? Unless the crowd’s purpose is to make the Court change its mind.
The political scientist knows where this can lead. Movements, he writes, are often shaped by unpredictable events, among them “an act of violence by the state that sparks outrage”, and “we may only be a slender thread away from that moment”. He sees the danger. Yet all he has to offer is more turning out. Mr Mehta wants to defend democracy by making institutions surrender to the street. Democracy deserves a better defence.
