Take Two
The Right to Not Vote
Madhavankutty Pillai Madhavankutty Pillai 02 Mar, 2012
… is as much a citizen’s right as the right to vote
There’s no denying Arvind Kejriwal didn’t think much about voting (until now, that is), otherwise who forgets something like that? But where he really got it wrong was in the guilt that he self-willed himself into later. When you begin to behave like someone caught with his hands in the cookie jar, why expect enemies to be kind to you? Here’s what he should have said: ‘‘If you want to, go ahead and vote; I don’t want to.’’ Forgetting to vote, going campaigning on the day, going on a picnic while polling is in progress, going up to the booth and returning without voting… these are all as right as any self-righteous urban educated middle class Indian’s (SRUEMCI) recent finding that the vote is important.
Among SRUEMCIs, there are fashionable things to pontificate on—outrage over rape, outrage over communalism, outrage over RTI activists being killed, et cetera. Then there are the unfashionable things—child abuse, slum demolitions, starvation deaths, anything in the Northeast, et al. These don’t trend on Twitter, they don’t get a line in the newspapers with a mug shot, and you don’t see anyone having an apoplectic attack about it. But said SRUEMCIs will take it as a personal insult if you tell them you didn’t vote.
The assumption behind such smug self-righteousness is that voting, and by extension democracy, protects you from all the evil that is out there. It reaffirms your freedoms. This, alas, is just not true. That Hitler came in with a vote is a cliché now. There is democracy in Pakistan but that doesn’t make it a happy place to start an RSS shakha. What the SRUEMCI confuses democracy with is liberal values. Simple ideas like all people being equal, everyone having the right to do what he chooses as long as it doesn’t hurt others, the rule of law, the right to justice, the freedom to observe any religion or deny God altogether, and so on. It is these rights he wants to be seen protecting. These values, however, exist on their own, independent of political systems, and included in them is the right to not vote as well.
And to anyone who says that by not voting you forfeit the right to criticise things, tell him this: in that case, will you also stop taking my taxes?
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