From March 1 to May 5 this year, five television channels offered 2,893 minutes of primetime coverage to Narendra Modi, 819 minutes to Arvind Kejriwal and 384 minutes to Rahul Gandhi, according to data compiled by CMS Media lab. That's a little over 68 hours devoted to three talking heads.
Throw in the mandatory stories of the first and the farthest polling booths, the youngest and oldest voters, and of course the Chhattisgarhi newlyweds who fulfilled their democratic duties before their conjugal ones, and An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election, former Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi's book, seems less an exploration of an undocumented wonder and more a paean to the elections and their quinquennial recurrence.
The book is part civics textbook and part sarkari PowerPoint presentation. The best way to understand a PowerPoint presentation is as a cultural artifact, and the most useful way to read a textbook is against the text.
"Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that 'we' - not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one - participate in its coming into being," writes J M Coetzee in Dairy of a Bad Year, "But the fact is that the only 'we' we know - ourselves and the people close to us - are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are."
The public ideological debates in colonial India and post-colonial India, thus, haven't been about the existence of the state, but on its form and the method of its eternal perpetuation - what Coetzee calls the 'rule of succession'.
"The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler," he writes, "it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict."
Perhaps the most revealing bit of news I read this election season was a tweet from the twitter handle of state-broadcaster Doordarshan - "90,000 security personnel have been deployed to ensure peaceful conduct of 1st phase of general elections" @DDNewsLive tweeted without a trace of irony - and accounts of Narendra Modi, India's Workaholic-in-Chief's daily campaigning from a corporate jet.
The undocumented wonder of the Indian elections isn't the paper saved by the electronic voting process (11,000 metric tonnes, according to Quraishi's estimates), but the incredible resources - both physical and cultural - that must be continually mobilised to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state form: security forces, jets, helicopters, armoured vehicles, cash, liquor, saris, and the occasional public rally.
"Yes, from the outside it indeed looks like all-out war but the difference is that this war is waged in peace time by the people themselves," Quraishi writes, with the subtlety of a Soviet propagandist, "not against an enemy but for the preservation of democracy,"
The "enemy" one presumes, are those who don't want to vote.
When Quraishi began his tenure at the Election Commission, he writes, in a chapter aptly titled 'Engaging Youth: Turning Subjects into Citizens', "it was distressing to discover that the voter enrollment ratio among 18-20 year olds was only around 12 percent!"
For a moment, Quraishi was nonplussed; "It is necessary to reach out to the remaining eligible, yet non-voting youth in the country, to know where they are, what they are doing, why they are not turning up at polling booths," he writes, unshakeable in his belief that what young people want, more than anything, is for the authorities to know where they are and what they are doing.
And so 600 students from 17 colleges in Bulandshahr made 190,296 sq ft of propaganda in the form a rangoli, "It started with Bharat Sone ki Chiria," Quraishi writes, and you know the drill: coming of the British, revolt of 1857, Gandhiji, independence, democracy, Election Commission.
There was a panel missing in the rangoli: the one where "the people" are offered a choice of not joining either India or Pakistan. But wait, that never happened.
Moving on, then, the biggest rangoli in the world was followed by "the biggest pyramid in the world with thee thousand thermocol cups" - each cup inscribed with 'Do minute vote ke liye' - and the "biggest lighting of lamps for the cause of elections in world" where 240,000 candles and lamps were used to etch out a giant map of India at the Bulandshahr police lines and then, of course, a cartoon series that "associated each aspect of everyday normal life with voting."
Data suggests that most of the good people of Bulandshahr really did associate voting with each aspect of everyday normal life: 61 per cent of them turned up at polling booths this election. As for the rest? Who are these people, who neither take up arms nor show up to vote, who appear disinterested in the fate of the Sone ki Chiria?
Once more, Coetzee offers a possibility.
"There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day," he writes with characteristic clarity. "It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration."
In the afterglow of Modi's overwhelming victory, it is tempting to read willed obscurity as weakness, quietism as cowardice, and inner emigration as defeat. "The pseudo-secularists have been defeated", "The fascists have won", destiny beckons on both sides. Where should you go? Out into the world: travel light, hone your craft and live by stealth. "When we come to it," as poet Maya Angelou writes, "we must confess that we are the possible."
AN UNDOCUMENTED WONDER : THE MAKING OF THE GREAT INDIAN ELECTION
Author: S Y Quraishi
Publisher: Rainlight/ Rupa
Pages: 434
Price: Rs 795
Throw in the mandatory stories of the first and the farthest polling booths, the youngest and oldest voters, and of course the Chhattisgarhi newlyweds who fulfilled their democratic duties before their conjugal ones, and An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election, former Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi's book, seems less an exploration of an undocumented wonder and more a paean to the elections and their quinquennial recurrence.
The book is part civics textbook and part sarkari PowerPoint presentation. The best way to understand a PowerPoint presentation is as a cultural artifact, and the most useful way to read a textbook is against the text.
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Quraishi's book, much like most of the reportage this summer, is part of a self-reinforcing culture of state-habituation where any possibilities of a different world are drowned out by the steady thudding of the democratic drum.
"Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that 'we' - not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one - participate in its coming into being," writes J M Coetzee in Dairy of a Bad Year, "But the fact is that the only 'we' we know - ourselves and the people close to us - are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are."
The public ideological debates in colonial India and post-colonial India, thus, haven't been about the existence of the state, but on its form and the method of its eternal perpetuation - what Coetzee calls the 'rule of succession'.
"The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler," he writes, "it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict."
Perhaps the most revealing bit of news I read this election season was a tweet from the twitter handle of state-broadcaster Doordarshan - "90,000 security personnel have been deployed to ensure peaceful conduct of 1st phase of general elections" @DDNewsLive tweeted without a trace of irony - and accounts of Narendra Modi, India's Workaholic-in-Chief's daily campaigning from a corporate jet.
The undocumented wonder of the Indian elections isn't the paper saved by the electronic voting process (11,000 metric tonnes, according to Quraishi's estimates), but the incredible resources - both physical and cultural - that must be continually mobilised to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state form: security forces, jets, helicopters, armoured vehicles, cash, liquor, saris, and the occasional public rally.
"Yes, from the outside it indeed looks like all-out war but the difference is that this war is waged in peace time by the people themselves," Quraishi writes, with the subtlety of a Soviet propagandist, "not against an enemy but for the preservation of democracy,"
The "enemy" one presumes, are those who don't want to vote.
When Quraishi began his tenure at the Election Commission, he writes, in a chapter aptly titled 'Engaging Youth: Turning Subjects into Citizens', "it was distressing to discover that the voter enrollment ratio among 18-20 year olds was only around 12 percent!"
For a moment, Quraishi was nonplussed; "It is necessary to reach out to the remaining eligible, yet non-voting youth in the country, to know where they are, what they are doing, why they are not turning up at polling booths," he writes, unshakeable in his belief that what young people want, more than anything, is for the authorities to know where they are and what they are doing.
And so 600 students from 17 colleges in Bulandshahr made 190,296 sq ft of propaganda in the form a rangoli, "It started with Bharat Sone ki Chiria," Quraishi writes, and you know the drill: coming of the British, revolt of 1857, Gandhiji, independence, democracy, Election Commission.
There was a panel missing in the rangoli: the one where "the people" are offered a choice of not joining either India or Pakistan. But wait, that never happened.
Moving on, then, the biggest rangoli in the world was followed by "the biggest pyramid in the world with thee thousand thermocol cups" - each cup inscribed with 'Do minute vote ke liye' - and the "biggest lighting of lamps for the cause of elections in world" where 240,000 candles and lamps were used to etch out a giant map of India at the Bulandshahr police lines and then, of course, a cartoon series that "associated each aspect of everyday normal life with voting."
Data suggests that most of the good people of Bulandshahr really did associate voting with each aspect of everyday normal life: 61 per cent of them turned up at polling booths this election. As for the rest? Who are these people, who neither take up arms nor show up to vote, who appear disinterested in the fate of the Sone ki Chiria?
Once more, Coetzee offers a possibility.
"There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day," he writes with characteristic clarity. "It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration."
In the afterglow of Modi's overwhelming victory, it is tempting to read willed obscurity as weakness, quietism as cowardice, and inner emigration as defeat. "The pseudo-secularists have been defeated", "The fascists have won", destiny beckons on both sides. Where should you go? Out into the world: travel light, hone your craft and live by stealth. "When we come to it," as poet Maya Angelou writes, "we must confess that we are the possible."
AN UNDOCUMENTED WONDER : THE MAKING OF THE GREAT INDIAN ELECTION
Author: S Y Quraishi
Publisher: Rainlight/ Rupa
Pages: 434
Price: Rs 795