At the end of the first phase of polling in Bihar and Jharkhand and the completion of the election process in Haryana, the irony is underlined. The turnout figures remain healthful in elections in India even as poll-related violence gives continued reason to worry about the robustness of Indian democracy. Preliminary estimates attest that people turned out to exercise their democratic right to vote in moderate to large numbers in the three states — poll boycotts were courageously defied in the Naxalite-affected areas of Jharkhand and Bihar. But in far too many places in these states, the tryst between voter and government was marred and even defeated by violence.Contrary to democracies of the west, India’s democracy does not confront the spectre of the disaffected voter, disabused of her own efficacy. The links between voting and governance may be tenuous still, but poll watchers have chronicled a heartening pattern of electoral participation in the 1990s: it consists of a high over-all turnout and a higher than average turnout of the marginalised sections. Voters in rural, less developed areas, the backward castes, tribals and women need no top-down campaigns to persuade them to vote. They routinely turn out, in larger numbers than their compatriots in more privileged locales, to reaffirm their faith in the democratic process. By failing to provide every voter the physical security to cast her vote, institutions of the state, in Bihar as well as in Jharkhand, have spectacularly failed to live up to this trust that is reposed in them in the most basic of ways.This round of polling took place in the so-called badlands of these two states. Violence has been routinised and normalised in the districts of Gaya and Jehanabad, for instance, where the state, the law, politics itself, has withered in the face of Naxalite terror. Hopefully, polling will be more peaceful in areas of these states that are not extremist-infested. But the incidence of poll-related violence in these areas has resurrected a profound challenge for institutions of the Indian state: to cut through the intimidation and violence, and the apathy and the inertia, and reclaim these areas for democracy.
