Paromita Vohra: Vote for vote

John Abraham and Kiran Rao show their inked fingers after casting their votes at the recently held BMC elections PicPTIFor a few years now the act of voting has become a style statement Newspapers ritually carry a photograph of some celebrity showing us their voting finger with its ink stain Social media updates have become mandatory also sometimes accompanied by a picture some of direct some artfulThis year the BMC election campaigning was more robust than weve ever seen it It also had a squeaky new shininess to it Everywhere you went you saw groups of people campaigning in clothes as brightly white as a Barista tubelight There were lots of billboards There were many exhortations in the media This was the crescendo of a style of talking about voting that has been gathering speed for the last few yearsOn the day of the elections some stores offered a discount mdash show your voting mark and get a 20 discount This was both startling and very fitting indeed The act of voting has been converted into an act of consumption It is only logical that it is conflated with the act of purchase carried out by the consumer as citizen and the citizen as consumer On the day following the election too the citizenconsumer is thanked in the manner of shareholders This mediatised interaction by political bodies is carried out in the same space in newspapers usually reserved for advertising It builds the same kind of relationship with the consumer citizen as brands doWhat then is the product that is sold through this interaction It is the entire complexity of political engagement boiled down to an applike political object ndash the vote It is a kind of svachha politics erased of all its knotty issues For the middle classes the idea that politics is a dirty business has been a longchanted mantra which allows one to pretend that by not voting or by not caring about political choices they are preventing their souls from being sullied by all that politics represents It is an incantation that allows people to imagine that they are no part of or implicated in political processes which are made up of elaborate equations of privilege and identityThrough the svaccha politics idea consumercitizens are now able to divorce the violence underlying politics because voting becomes the primary political activity Once we have voted we may just keep defending the purchasevote of our choice rather than engage with political ideas for themselves It allows people to even more sharply divorce themselves from an occurrence like say recent violence on the Delhi University campus where members of the ABVP beat up teachers and students and hunted students out from their paying guest accommodations to attack them later The voter can pretend that they are not implicated in these political moments by only visiting the mall of voting and reading its advertising supplement the television news cycle which also focuses cyclically only on a few incidents rather than a more sustained political analysisBut to reduce a citizens political activity to the simple act of voting is the same as reducing sexual life to the act of intercourse rather than the complex weave of consent agency health gender and eroticism Similarly voting too is only one though important part of a thriving political engagement one we deeply need to remember and rebuild in ourselves as citizens todayParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at wwwparodevipicturescom