Displaced persons and the right to vote

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1967) had noted that the process of deciding who “the people” are cannot exist without exclusion.

It had rightly predicted that the relationship between refugee flows and the development of modern states would be a crucial one.

In this light, the right to vote, that was granted to and exercised by the Tibetans, for the first time, enabled them to participate in a general election. With the dust settling down now on the recent elections, it’s time to reflect on some of its underlying features.

Citizenship is intrinsically linked with voting rights and the right to franchise has been the dividing line between insiders and those termed as ‘outsiders’. In the face of life-threatening persecution refugees ‘vote with their feet’ and flee the state of their nationality. In host states, these refugees most often live deprived of basic rights. Until now, Tibetan refugees in India have lived legally as ‘foreigners’, but often deprived of the right to legally own land or have jobs. Following the 2013 court order granting Indian citizenship to Tibetan refugees born on Indian soil after January 26, 1950, all states in India had been directed by the Election Commission to include Tibetans in India in the electoral rolls. 

Hence, more than 200 Tibetans registered themselves as voters in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh. Despite poor enrolment numbers, those Tibetans who exercised this newly gained right argued that having the right to franchise strengthens their voice and agency. Others, however, are sceptical that acquisition of voter-id cards would naturally lead to the next step of getting Indian passports. Their worry is that this right might weaken their resolve to return to their homeland. 

While refugees, like Tibetans, cross an international border to come to India, internally displaced persons (IDPs) are those who are rendered homeless yet resettled within the national boundaries of their home state. The right to vote is also an indispensable right for this latter group of citizens, a right that recently sadly disappeared for many IDPs like the riot victims of Muzzafarnagar. The communal violence in this municipality of Uttar Pradesh in 2013 had forced thousands, mostly Muslims, to flee their homes and take shelter instead in plots of land bought from compensation money. 

It was asserted that all attempts were made to bring these displaced persons back to their native villages to enable them to cast their vote. But figures available have varied. While some media reports have claimed that more than 2,300 IDPs displaced from their native villages by the riots had enrolled as voters during this election, the fact is that this figure comprises only five per cent of the estimated figure of more than 40,000 displaced last year. 

However, other figures provided by the Muzaffarnagar district magistrate, Kaushal Raj Sharma claim that 6,000 riot victims in the district had been identified as eligible voters, of which 3,500 had registered themselves at places of their rehabilitation. There were also reports that more than 250 displaced people had exercised their franchise at Khampur village where they are now living in a newly constructed housing colony. Similarly, Muslim families living in relief camps in Loi were reportedly escorted by the police to the pooling booth in Faguna village to cast their vote.

 But despite these few reported incidents the psycho-social trauma that accompanies the flight of a refugee is unimaginable. This memory and fear of violence made those who had returned just to vote scurry back to the relief camps again after casting their votes. Also many villages in Muzaffarnagar, like Kutba, had Muslims registered as voters, but who were no longer living there. Thus, despite the state of Uttar Pradesh exhibiting a record voter turnout of nearly 70 per cent, the ambiguity around the right to vote of those internally displaced within it remains a grey area.

Abstention from voting

Abstention from voting also becomes a weapon of negotiation in the hands of the displaced. The development-induced displaced persons of the five villages of Gharauli Hurd, Harsaru, Mohammadpur, Khandsa and Narsinghpur in Gurgaon, Haryana had initially threatened a boycott of this year’s general elections. Nearly 1,300 acres of land had been acquired from these villages for the setting up of the proposed (and later called off) Reliance Special Economic Zone (SEZ) by the Haryana government in 2006. The people, particularly of Gharuali Khurd, which had borne the brunt of land acquisition due to the construction of a seven-foot wall around the village cutting them off from the neighbouring villages, were frustrated that none of the political parties had come to help them when they were in need. 

Displaced persons have invariably invoked the argument of the Hegelian ‘Other’. They have reminded us that the tragic consequences of losing one’s home and livelihood have, nearly always, been accompanied by social segregation, by the convoluted assertion that the displaced are different and not the same, consequences which ironically play out differently for various categories of the displaced.

While giving the right to vote to Tibetans may be seen as the final marker of assimilation, of the attempt to make them feel ‘similar’, the fear and trauma leading to the reluctance of the displaced in Muzzafarnagar to vote reminds us of the pain of being made to feel ‘different’. Elections have the potential of becoming an exercise of inclusion.

 Unfortunately this time too, perhaps the gains have been less, the losses more.

(The writer teaches political science at St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore)