Citizen-State relations and the burden of document raj

For over a month now, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has ensnared the bulk of Bihar’s voting population in a maze of paperwork, thanks to its Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the voter rolls.

- Yamini Aiyar

In the process, widely accepted documents — Aadhaar, ration card and the voter card itself — have been declared suspect, despite the Supreme Court's intervention. Through executive fiat, ECI has created a new, arbitrary document hierarchy, declaring 11 specific documents —some of which even the most privileged Indians struggle to procure — as appropriate for determining citizenship. Now, as the process moves to the question of deletions from the voter rolls and the very real threat of disenfranchisement, ECI is obdurately hiding behind its paperwork, refusing public access to the list of deleted names. This tyranny of paper is also at the centre of another controversy. The enduring image of Rahul Gandhi's recent press conference is the seven-foot-high stack of paper — the physical electoral rolls — that the Congress team trawled through to identify discrepancies.

In different ways, both episodes reveal one of the most pernicious aspects of the exercise of State power in India — the use of documents to mediate citizen-State relations and their role in feeding the State's obsession with ordering citizens into administrative categories of “eligible” and “ineligible”. Bureaucratic norms cohere around the idea that “good governance” is about weeding out the “ineligible”.