Manu Joseph: Why one may choose not to vote—and why this choice needn’t be a moral failure

It is with that same pious face that some people insult those who don’t vote. Every now and then, I hear radio jockeys, actors, comedians and others give a lecture on why everyone should go and vote. There used to be a man in South Mumbai who would actually spend money to scream on hoardings that the very meaning of ‘idiot’ is a person who didn’t vote.

This learning was apparently drawn from ancient Greece, a frequently cited source of nonsense. An ‘idiot’ though did mean a person who did not participate in public life, which in my lexicon would mean an idiot back then was a wise philosopher.

I don’t vote; I have never voted. Until 20 years ago, it was no big deal. A big section of the urban middle-class was like me. As leaders of the freedom movement receded, Indian politics ceased to be a reformative movement led by an idealistic upper class and instead became something dominated by practical people. In fact, Indian politics appeared to be the revenge of the poor.

As a result, outside Kerala and Bengal, the upper classes seemed to lose interest in voting. And a dim notion came to be that India was so backward because its finest didn’t vote.

Now, going by turnout data, they have returned to voting. They even seem to share some of the sentiments of average voters. Voting is now so popular that there was a lot of middle-class chatter about the recent municipal elections in Mumbai. Just a decade ago, a lot of them may not have known that such elections even exist.

A speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival told me that she voted to show the ink stain on her finger to an audience as proof of her being an involved modern Indian. So, I thought I must come clean to my audience—that I do not vote; I have never voted.

I don’t vote because there is nothing I want that I can get in this country through my franchise; that’s because the majority of people would probably be against it or do not consider it their priority, and life is influenced by the priorities of a society.

I am talking about more than what politics can get me; I am talking about almost everything. I don’t get the films and series I can enjoy. I don’t get even the food I want to eat in a public space like an airport, or even a vast private space like a shopping mall.

I don’t eat diamonds; I just want to eat something that won’t kill me. Let us say you don’t wish to eat rice or wheat or stale oil or butter or sugar; you will find nothing to eat in a public space. To be austere, it appears, is the highest form of luxury. Often, I carry my own unsalted peanuts. I used to do it even on visits to the homes of other people, but have stopped after eliciting mildly violent responses.

I cannot bear the music that usually plays in a restaurant or shopping arcade or inside a plane; wherever I go, I am tortured by the tyranny of the majority.

Politics is as mainstream as food and noise, but it is the only one that asks people to stand in a queue to legitimize ways to deny me my way of life. Why would I participate, especially when I know that a majority of Indians have immense stamina for useless issues? What is the point?

But what is it that I want? Just roads that are not broken, with designs that have meaning and sidewalks built on the assumption of human use, and cities that are clean. I want the state to provide everything a person needs on the road, including the road itself, so that it has the moral right, like the Delhi Metro, to enforce its rules.

And for other people around the country, I want government schools to have benches and desks, walls that are not the colour of jaundice, and not to smell of urine. And public transport that does not convey poverty; and government hospitals where people don’t need to show money to be accepted as patients worthy of treatment.

All this does not require India to deliver a quality life comparable with European levels, but merely meet minimum East Asian standards. This is how people in many middle-income nations around the world live. While India is classified among them, I cannot hope to get those basic provisions through voting.

If you look at the nature of politics, and how many politicians behave, I am fairly confident that voting cannot be insisted upon as an act of morality.

Remember, the chief architect of India’s Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, never won a Lok Sabha election. He had to enter Parliament through the Rajya Sabha route. This was at the peak of Indian nationalism, soon after independence, and he had enormous popularity among ‘Scheduled Castes.’ But then, he needed the votes of other castes to win. Was he punished, possibly, for saying that all Indians were equal?

The turmoil across the world today is not caused by unelected autocrats, but popularly elected men. Technology has ensured that democracy is able to reflect human nature very accurately. Everyone wanted such ‘true’ democracy; here it is. And, as a voter, I don’t matter.

If I say that I don’t want to stand in line to watch a daft film starring Salman Khan, the middle-class would not be surprised. Yet, many of the middle-class are when I say I do not wish to participate in the mother of all that’s mainstream in India.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’