Right to vote

The Supreme Court judgment that prisoners, other than those detained under preventive detention, were not entitled to vote is retrograde. It seems to be the result of an oversimplification of the issue. In arriving at its decision, the court classifies the people into two categories those within and without the jails. What is worse, the court presupposes that those behind bars are there because of their own fault and they must, therefore, forgo certain freedoms and privileges, one of them being the right to vote. Since the very purpose of putting a person in the jail is to restrict his movement, the court believes he must not be entitled to go to the polling booth and exercise his franchise. After all, as the apex court asks, the right to vote or stand as a candidate for election is not a civil right but is a special right created by statute. At any given time, a large majority of the prisoners are undertrial prisoners, who are presumed to be innocent unless proved otherwise. With the courts unable to clear the huge backlog of cases, the number of undertrial prisoners is unlikely to show any appreciable fall in the near future. It is possible that many of them might have landed there for no fault of theirs. When a couple of gentlemen could be shot in broad daylight and in as public a place as New Delhi8217;s Connaught Place by the custodians of law and order, is it surprising that people are sent to jail on trumped-up charges? There are others who in the course of upholding a lofty principle or fighting for a genuine public cause found themselves clubbed with criminals and pushed into jails. To treat them all as one composite unit and deny them the right to vote is unfair.

In the past, political leaders like George Fernandes and Kalpanath Rai were able to contest and win elections from jail. If such a facility can be extended to prisoners, it does not stand to reason why the right to vote should be denied to them. There is no law that prevents a prisoner who is on parole during an election from casting his vote. If a prisoner on parole can vote, denying the privilege to his cellmate for no other reason than that he happens to be in jail is discriminatory. The court has specifically mentioned the case of persons with criminal background whose presence at the polling booth might vitiate the electoral atmosphere. But by no stretch of the imagination can it be argued that the votes that they may cast will not be in the interest of law and order. In any case, the quality of a vote is not dependent on the quality of the voter.

All this should logically raise the issue of how to enable prisoners to vote. As the court has pointed out, it is not necessary that all the prisoners will show a keenness to vote. Why blame them when statistics show that even the educated, higher income classes have a disdain for taking part in elections? Presumably, only a small section of the prisoners will ask for their voting rights. It should not be a problem for the government to arrange postal ballot papers for them. When countries like South Africa and the United States allow their citizens living abroad to take part in their national elections, a facility which the NRIs do not enjoy, why should the unfortunate prisoners be deprived of this right?