On Nursing an Ailing Constitution
Almost everyday, provisions of the Indian Constitution are being used to wage lawfare against its own people. It's time to take charge before the Rubicon is crossed.
I write this from the morbid confines of my ill-lit room, from a bed which smells of disease and weariness, nursing a bout of sickness which has now overstayed its welcome. The fact that I find it difficult to fall asleep without white noise playing from my YouTube does not help because as I have tried to get rest against my will in the last two days, a heady cocktail of pills, voices from YouTube and delirium from the sickness have caused my fever-addled mind to conceive the most unexpected phantasms of hope and despair.
One of these visions (?) was of this essay by Virginia Woolf that I remember reading about a decade ago, when another bout of illness had made me act like the boy Schatz from Ernest Hemingway’s A Day’s Wait:
‘About what time do you think I’m going to die?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘About how long will it be before I die?’
‘You aren’t going to die. What’s the matter with you?’
Oh, yes, I am. I heard him say a hundred and two.’
‘People don’t die with a fever of one hundred and two. That’s a silly way to talk.’
‘I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can’t live with fortyfour degrees. I’ve got a hundred and two.’
He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o’clock in the morning.
In On Being Ill, Woolf describes the ‘solitude of the bedroom’ as a useful consequence of illness: a profound spiritual experience per her, but one which I fail to see perhaps due to overstimulation. Another vision was of this song that I had heard for the first time a couple years ago when I fell in love with this woman post a phase of life which felt like a prolonged bout of illness:
Eita tomar gaan
…
Tumi jorer seshey surjodhoya ghor
(This is your song
…
You are like a house bathed by sunlight once the illness is gone)
That’s how falling in love felt like then. That’s how falling in love should always feel like. I hope you have someone to share this song with.
By the time night fell yesterday, the romance had evaporated. Amit Shah’s proposal to amend Articles 75, 164 and 239AA- for facilitating removal of, inter alia, Chief Ministers and Ministers of States detained for 30 consecutive days for allegedly committing offences punishable with imprisonment for five years or more- was all over the news. While it is likely that the Bill gets referred to a select committee first (given that members of the Parliament have been given no time to review its clauses), this Government’s mission of driving a thousand knives into the Constitution continues unabated.
One wonders, irrespective, if the Constitution, an Executive-trusting document depending mostly on the goodwill of its custodian for truthful implementation, even requires nefarious amendments for its illegitimate use. A review of what’s happened in this country in the last two months tells a tale of weaponisation of the Constitution’s otherwise benign and pro-people provisions to meet anti-democratic ends.
I represent a client before the Delhi High Court whose residential home was illegally demolished in June this year. Even as we were contesting the validity of the demolition before the Court, he received a notice from the Election Commission which sought ‘reasons’ as to why his name should not be removed from the electoral rolls of Kalkaji now that he had ceased to be ‘ordinarily resident’ in that constituency. What does a citizen do when the State turns this vindictive? Not only will it raze your house illegally, it will also use this illegal razing to wipe out your other constitutional entitlements. The Constitution does entitle my client, a citizen of India, to remain on the electoral rolls; the State however, knocks down his house so that aspersions can be cast on his citizenship. The Constitution stands as it is. The relationship of my client with the Constitution stands altered forever.
Another testament to this rapidly changing relationship is the ongoing revision of electoral rolls in Bihar. Ever since independence, it was the obligation of the Election Commission to ensure that all eligible adults of an area find their place on the voter list; it is, in fact, its primary function as an independent constitutional functionary. For the first time in the history of independent India, this responsibility has now been put on the voter, something which Yogendra Yadav rightly calls a ‘tectonic shift in the architecture of citizenship and universal adult franchise in India’. A sudden and rushed process, this revision of rolls in Bihar does not even afford adequate time to a voter \ to take steps for securing documents; it throws voters out for mere non-submission of an extra-legal ‘enumeration form’. In a functional democracy where rights were respected and valued, this would anger a lot of people. And so it has.
In this picture is Vachiya Devi, an 85 year old elector from Bihar who was declared ‘dead’ by the Election Commission after its so-called house to house enumeration exercise conducted in the month of July. This picture was clicked by my colleague Natasha on the 12th of this month, when Vachiya was in the Supreme Court to assert her constitutional right to be on the voter list in Bihar. She is frail and when she walks, her back forms a hump.
From my vantage point in this ailing democracy, I somehow see Vachiya standing very tall, taller than the educated metropolis populace existing peacefully in its bubble, worried mostly about the extent of ethanol blended in its petrol.
A large number of Indian on the margins continue to witness a sharp, coordinated attack on their citizenship, on their ‘right to have rights’. This State-sponsored attack manifests in various forms: demolitions, deportations, removal from electoral rolls. As long as the likes of Vachiya exist, who can travel from the remotest part of Bihar to the Supreme Court to exert her right to equal existence in this country, giving up hope is criminal.