Tag: Election Commission

Schrödinger’s temple

On January 22, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister and now high-priest Narendra Modi, priests and officials allegedly consecrated the idol of Lord Ram at the new temple in Ayodhya, with many celebrities in attendance. (‘Alleged’ because I don’t know if it’s a legitimate consecration, given the disagreement between some spiritual leaders over its rituals.) TV news channels on both sides of the spectrum were outwardly revelling in the temple’s festivities, bothering not at all with covering the ceremony in a dispassionate way. Their programming was unwatchable.

This Ram temple is a physical manifestation of the contemporary Indian nation – a superposition of state and sanctum sanctorum at once, collapsing like Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat to one or the other depending on political expedience. The temple, like many others around the country now, is both kovil and katchi office (Tamil for ‘temple’ and ‘party office’).

(I’m hardly unique in these views but I also suspect I’m in a minority, with few others to reinforce their legitimacy, so I’m writing them down so they’re easier for me to recall.)

After the consecration ceremony, Prime Minister Modi delivered a speech, as is his wont, further remixing the aspirations of the Indian state and its people with a majoritarian religious identity. (The mic then passed to the treasurer of the temple trust, who spoke in praise of Modi, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, who spoke in praise of Modi’s ostensible ideals.) For now, the results of the Lok Sabha elections later this year seem like a foregone conclusion, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party widely expected to begin a third term in May. The temple’s opening was effectively a show of strength by Modi, that he delivers on his promises no matter the obstacles in his way, even if any of them are legitimate.

Before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, in another show of strength, the Modi government signed off on the anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test in March, in which a missile launched from the ground flew 300 km up and destroyed a dummy satellite in earth orbit. The operation was called ‘Mission Shakti’ (Hindi for ‘strength’). A statement from the Ministry of External Affairs said, “The test was done to verify that India has the capability to safeguard our space assets”. Oddly, however, the Defence R&D Organisation, which conducted the test, had had ASAT capabilities for a decade by then under its Ballistic Missile Defence programme, rendering the timing suspect.

Considering Prime Minister Modi delivered another hour-long speech after the test, I’ve been inclined to side with the theory that it was conducted to give him airtime that was otherwise unavailable due to the Election Commission’s restrictions on election candidates coming on air in a short period before polling. In 2024, of course, it’s an open secret that the Election Commission determines polling schedules based on the BJP’s convenience.

Vaccines for votes

A week or so ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bihar released its poll manifesto, the first point on which was that should the party win, it would make a COVID-19 vaccine cleared by the ICMR available for free to every resident of the state. It was an unethical move, and Siddharth Varadarajan and I explained why.

Soon after, trolls on Twitter pointed out that Joe Biden had made the same promise ahead of the US presidential elections. And this morning, Indian Express quoted the Election Commission saying the BJP’s promise didn’t violate the poll code; the report also included a curious paragraph: that “the EC had taken the same stand on a complaint received during the Lok Sabha elections last year against the Congress’s NYAY scheme that guaranteed a minimum income of Rs 6,000 per month, or Rs 72,000 a year, for 25 crore people.”

The BJP’s promise still feels unethical to me. This isn’t for reasons that have anything to do with the poll code if only because the poll code’s scope doesn’t extend beyond the election itself, to the bigger picture.

At the outset, I don’t think vaccines should feature at all in election rhetoric (even if this may be wishful thinking with a majoritarian-populist government). But here we are.

The BJP is in power at the Centre – it runs the national government – and is hoping to come to power in the state. It isn’t necessarily including Nitish Kumar, the state’s incumbent chief minister and whose party the BJP is allied with, because the vaccine promise appeared only in the BJP’s manifesto, not in the alliance’s, and was announced with much fanfare by the Union finance minister. So Kumar was nowhere in the picture but the Centre was. This is a slight but significant difference vis-à-vis Biden’s promise.

State is a health subject in India but a COVID-19 vaccine, should one become available, will have significant participation by the Centre, from purchasing to distribution. Note that India’s states didn’t fight polio – they simply couldn’t. The country has a whole did and today COVID-19 presents an even bigger challenge.

A new study, echoing some older ones, has found that antibodies to COVID-19 fade over a few months. Assuming for a moment that vaccine-induced antibodies work like natural antibodies, and setting aside the fact that the question of antibody persistence is yet to be settled, access to vaccines (including the question of affordability) matters as much as its uniformity. That is, the level of access should be uniform across the epidemic’s ‘jurisdiction’.

For example, if a state with poor pubic health care and infrastructure to begin with is forced to administer the vaccine by itself, failures on its part could allow the virus to become endemic to that region, and allow it spread once again through the rest of the population once their antibody responses have weakened. So an additional pitfall here is if the BJP fragments the responsibility of distributing and administering a COVID-19 vaccine to the states, in an effort to legitimise piecemeal agreements based on political expediency, the vaccination drive will fail, especially in states like Bihar.

So while state governments will be able to decide whether to sell the vaccines for free, the decision depends considerably on the Centre’s cooperation. In effect, the BJP at the Centre abdicates the option to ensure everyone gets the vaccine at no cost when it offers to do so only in a specific area, and in exchange for votes.

Biden is not entirely in the clear either: ‘vaccines for votes’ is a prompt for voters to think of their choice of president as a question of life or death, which is nothing but a dire threat. But neither his case nor that of the Congress’s NYAY scheme are ones of abdicated responsibilities. Neither is yet in power in their respective countries, so neither is pulling back on their existing responsibilities, making their exercise contingent on electoral outcomes or vouchsafing the rewards to – from the epidemic’s PoV – an arbitrary section of the population.