Part of a giant guilt-and-nudge machinery, the Voice told every passenger who cared to listen to go forth and vote on June 1. Seated next to me, four college boys continued to read out passages excitedly from Jay Sekulow’s Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore, ignoring the messianic message of the Voice From Above.
A woman decked out for an outing in full LBD – Large Black Dress – burqa, impervious to both the Voice and voices discussing Islamic terrorism, follows her husband with their kid in his arms out of the moderately crowded train onto the platform outside. The Voice resumes its incantation once the train starts again.
Life doesn’t just continue during election time, it actually seems to sidestep it, as if elections were an unsavoury, desperate-to-be-stepped-into puddle, from this admittedly underground ‘street’ view. You wouldn’t have guessed that the PM had conducted a road show just the previous evening, with crowds paving the route as if it was Pep Guardiola’s side on a victory bus passing through a Manchester thoroughfare.
With this motley Metro crowd, I feel a genuine sense of camaraderie. They can probably all relate to Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s poem that starts with the line, ‘We are the music makers,’ tweaked to the opening stanza: ‘We are the non-voters,/ And we are the dreamers of dreams,/ Wandering by lone sea-breakers,/ And sitting by desolate streams; -/ World-losers and world-forsakers,/ On whom the pale moon gleams:/ Yet we are the movers and shakers/ Of the world for ever, it seems.’
Sitting inside the hurtling train, I imagined all of us free from the hypnotic spell of ‘Vote, or else…’ The non-voters – forever consigned into invisibility in voter turnout news reports by the percentage that did come out to vote – know that their voice counts for squat in what they believe to be an already almost-decided contest. They know that despite all that highfalutin talk about voting being ‘a duty‘ that celebrities roped in by EC drone on about, each vote counts only to buttress a mandate in an unevenly contested match. If elections are a ‘dance of democracy,’ to quote the appropriately titled Beatles song, ‘Helter Skelter’, ‘Well, you may be a lover/ But you ain’t no dancer.’ The non-voter doesn’t fall for the non sequitur of NOTA. What kind of presumptuous gesture is voting for ‘none of the above’? Only the self-righteous – and Lee Falk’s vintage comic book creation, The Phantom – go up to a bar and order a glass of milk.
And unless one is bewitched by a leader and his or her nanobot representatives – or, conversely, repelled by them – why on earth would anyone go out and vote? Well, perhaps for two reasons.
One, if you thought that your vote would matter. Like, somehow magically convince whoever you wanted to win that, say, the Gaza Strip that’s your daily route to work needs repairing. But that won’t happen. Because the candidate and his or her party has already cut an electoral deal with road building/repairing vendors, and footpath hawkers who literally push you out of the pavement onto the road. Since you can vote only once, their numerically stronger votes will count.
Two, if you treat voting like a social event, a pleasant communal (in the sense of local community) gathering like a Diwali mela, or a visit to the polling booth like a single puja pandal hop. But in weather conditions that not just fry eggs if you crack them open, but make them perfectly scrambled? No, thanks. There’s no shame in saying that discomfort – from heat, crowds, hassle, general feeling towards today’s electoral politics – is a valid reason enough for you to forego your vote. Duty is for the pliant, not just the compliant.
For all bona fide non-voters, there are better ways of virtue-signalling than flashing the (inked) finger on social media. If they’re tax payers – and it’s absolutely legal to not vote – not turning up to cast ‘your voice’ is a perfectly legitimate expression in a democracy. Your non-vote is your silent mutter.