Political Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India by Mrinalini Sinha Manu Goswami

Author:Mrinalini Sinha, Manu Goswami [Mrinalini Sinha, Manu Goswami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350239791
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

8

Voting and the Visual: Electoral Symbols, Legal Discourse, and the Sovereign People

David Gilmartin

The idea of “free and fair” elections is one central to virtually all modern conceptions of democracy, and yet the meaning of this term, which has been subjected to relatively little comparative cultural analysis, is one that continues to spark debate. It is in some sense a commonsense phrase, suggesting the embedding of the conduct of elections in an administrative regime independent of the immediate political control of the parties contesting the elections. But in actual fact, the meaning of “free and fair” is extraordinarily complex. The remit of election administration, and, indeed, the meaning of the phrase “free and fair,” has varied widely across societies. Its emphasis has in some countries and contexts focused on the “impartial” administrative tasks of preparing voter rolls, protecting the process of casting ballots, and ensuring the accurate counting of votes. But in other contexts, it has focused also on the oversight of election campaigns more broadly, including the administrative protection of “free” voter choice from both statist and societal pressures. At stake in such oversight has often been a vision of individual voter choice as threatened not only by government power, but also by multiple forms of social coercion, ranging from the manipulation of information (and the press), the unequal (or “unfair”) use of money to influence votes, and the manipulative use of “undue influence” by powerful leaders in society, whether religious or secular. “Fair” elections have required, in some formulations, the establishment of what is sometimes called a “level playing field.”

Tracking the conceptual meanings of “free and fair” in such contexts, in fact takes us toward one of the great conundrums of modern democracy. For at stake in such questions is precisely the question of what constitutes the realm of “politics” itself. Though elections are imagined everywhere as embedded in the realm of political competition, without which they could not possibly be seen as legitimate, their legitimacy hinges also on their framing within a structure imagined to stand apart from “politics.” For elections to be “free and fair,” they must, somehow, transcend the ultimately political nature of the men and women who contest and participate in them.

But from where, then, if not from the “people” who vote and contest them, does the authority to provide an external framework for “free and fair” elections derive? Here we encounter the central question about politics and democracy raised by Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha in the introduction to this volume. To fully understand the scope of politics in the context of democracy, it is necessary, as they suggest, to move beyond a definition of “politics” as simply the “competition for political power,” in order to understand a larger vision of “the political” that encompasses frameworks of collective authority, even when cast in opposition to the realm of popular “politics” more narrowly defined.

In twentieth-century India we can see this in the particular ways that the mid-century projection of the concept of the “people’s sovereignty” served as a foundation for democracy.

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