Tavleen Singh writes: Bihar electoral rolls revision — another idiotic exercise

Indian Express

a day ago

In an upper caste village in Bihar during a recent election, I was taken to see the quarter in which the mouse-catcher community lived. On travels in rural India, I have often seen desperate poverty, but this 'Musahar' quarter was the worst I have seen in a very long time. This mouse-catcher community was confined to living at some distance from the main village, in a largeish crater on the edge of a railway track. Mud hovels lined lanes so narrow that two people would find it hard to pass each other. When I went into one of the hovels, I found it frighteningly bereft of the ordinary things we need to survive — food, clothes, bedding.
The children I saw in this 'Musahar' quarter were barefoot and in rags, their hair and teeth showed signs of acute malnutrition. The men I spoke to said they made a living by doing odd jobs for the upper-caste families in the village. When I saw the excellent report in this newspaper last week on the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, I remembered that 'Musahar' quarter. It surprised me not at all that the reporters who wandered about Bihar to gauge the reaction of ordinary voters to the Election Commission's new demand for proof of identity found that they were puzzled and confused. They would have already found it hard enough to go through the process of getting the Aadhaar cards they all seemed to have. Speaking of Aadhaar cards, were we not told then that this card would supersede all our other cards and be final proof of identity?
There are more questions that need to be asked of the officials who thought up this new exercise and proved yet again that Indian officialdom remains worryingly oblivious to Indian realities. Did those in the Election Commission, who designed this 'Special intensive Revision' remember that an estimated 94 lakh Bihari families live on less than Rs 6,000 a month? Did they remember that more than half the population of this state is believed to live in poverty when it is measured on a multi-dimensional index? The multi-dimensions involve measuring things like nutrition, access to clean water, schools, healthcare and other things. Did they remember that the per capita income of a Bihari is Rs 54,111, when the national average is Rs 1,85,000?
The answer is that they probably did not and, in any case, they couldn't care less. They follow orders from their political masters who should know better since they are supposed to represent the people. But Lutyens' Delhi is a long, long way from Indian realities and the politicians who now inhabit its fine bungalows have lived there for more than a decade now. The next time you hear someone from the Bharatiya Janata Party, or one of their daft devotees, sneer at 'Lootyens', it is worth reminding them that the English-speaking elite they so despise does not live there anymore. They have taken their drawing rooms and refinements with them, and fled. This has totally changed the character of this tiny, privileged enclave, in which I spent my childhood and growing years. But that is a subject for another day.
This week, I would like to stick to the idiocy of schemes that are devised in the highest echelons of India's government. An Opposition leader in Bihar has referred to this latest scheme as 'votebandi' and compared it to 'notebandi'. It is a valid comparison. That other exercise was supposed to cleanse India of 'black money' and forever end the ways in which 'black' money was used to fund terrorism, corrupt politicians and other such things. So millions of very poor Indians were forced to queue for hours in the sun to exchange their old notes for new. And women I met in villages shortly after wept as they told me that they had lost the stashes that they concealed from alcoholic or reckless husbands. They did not dare reveal these secret stashes, so the money became useless.
Narendra Modi's demonetisation in 2016 failed so utterly to become the magic wand that he was told it would be when he was learning economics in his alma mater, the RSS, that he no longer mentions it when he boasts of his achievements. When elections come around, his income tax sleuths routinely find rooms full of illegal funds in the houses of politicians and the offices of political parties. The police routinely stop cars ferrying huge piles of cash to and from candidates. And, in a new chapter in this unending story of 'black money', a Supreme Court judge is likely to face impeachment because of singed piles of cash found in his backyard.
We need to ask why our political leaders and high officials are so removed from the realities of India that they have not noticed that the people of Bihar are nearly all too poor to get more documents to prove their identity. The question we should also be asking is what this 'special' inspection of election rolls seeks to achieve. If it is to weed out Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladesh who might be trying to vote for 'secular' parties, then it is a wasted exercise. Bihar is such a poor state that its own citizens are forced to travel to Delhi and Mumbai in search of employment of the most menial kind.