From Dhankar's Exit to Bihar's Voter Purge: How the BJP-RSS Axis Is Rewriting India's Electoral Playbook

The Hindu

24-07-2025

Published : Jul 24, 2025 15:15 IST - 5 MINS READ
Good riddance to bad rubbish is really the only thing one can say about Jagdeep Dhankhar's departure as Vice President, a post described as 'not worth a bucket of warm piss' by John Garner, Vice President to Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941. (In India, we could modify that to a bucket of warm cow piss.) A lawyer who worked for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh all his life, he degraded the constitutional position so appallingly that it is better to treat it like a bad memory and move on.
Who will come in his place? Who cares? Another cipher who will find new ways to soil the Chair of the Rajya Sabha. We will not know until the last minute, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces the name of some anonymous RSS zombie as the token representation of some low-hanging electoral fruit. It will be as sudden as the surprising Dhankhar resignation; and once again, journalists will have no clue.
Times have changed. Earlier, governance was transparent, and journalists could peek at the decision-making as it took shape. Now, journalism is dead. As for governance, it is as opaque as that of a despotic regime. Democracy is also dead.
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Journalists are whispering that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar could be a candidate for the vice presidency, despite repeated firm assertions by his colleagues in the Janata Dal (United) that he will lead it in the next Assembly election, due in a few months. That journalists, who are otherwise clueless, are suggesting this means it is what the government wants and is pressuring Nitish to take up the job. Nitish is not that dumb, though he is rumoured to have gone senile, floating in and out of lucidity.
Nitish as VP?
Why is the government pushing the Bihar Chief Minister out—a man who is part of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and with whose support the Central government is in power, especially with the election almost here? This brings us to the more important development this week, far more consequential than the tweedle-dee tweedledum vice presidency, and something that will have lasting consequences: the Election Commission's (ECI) brazen and morally reprehensible attempt to disenfranchise voters in Bihar.
On the evening of July 22, a TV channel reported that, according to the ECI, 51 lakh voters have been removed in the run-up to the draft electoral roll to be published on August 1, out of a total of 7,89,69,844 voters. That is a massive figure both in absolute numbers as well as in percentage (6.62 per cent).
This large-scale slashing of the voters' list is thanks to the ECI's Special Intensive Revision (SIR), in which voters must prove their citizenship. The political opposition tried to curtail this draconian measure by going to the Supreme Court. The court asked the ECI to allow Aadhaar cards, ration cards, and voter ID (it cannot get more Kafkaesque than a voter ID being invalid for voting). The ECI rejected this reasonable suggestion.
It wants voters to prove their citizenship by showing documents like birth certificates. This is cruel; even I do not have a birth certificate. (I was born in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, in a middle-class family.) It is like asking suspects to prove their innocence rather than the police proving its case, in a society saddled with corrupt and inept policing (as the Bombay High Court implied this week while dismissing the case against 12 accused in the 2006 train blasts case).
The worst sufferers in one of India's poorest States will be, not surprisingly, the poor. It is not just the Muslims (who form 17.7 per cent of the electorate), but also the Dalits and the Most Backward Classes, that will be affected by disenfranchisement. It also impacts Bihar's biggest export, its workforce, which is employed as agricultural labour in north India, as security guards in Delhi and Gurugram, and as domestic help all over the nation. These are economic migrants for whom Aadhaar is God and birth certificates are a mysterious phenomenon; they also risk getting disenfranchised.
The only people who gain from SIR are the privileged castes and the non-Yadav section of Other Backward Classes that has aligned itself with the BJP. In effect, the dice is being loaded against the BJP's opponents, the way Shakuni loaded his die against Yudhishthir in the Mahabharata. Yes, the ECI is helping the BJP to cheat.
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Although Samrat Choudhary (Finance Minister of Bihar) is yet another uninspiring BJP worker, his party is going all out to make him the next Chief Minister of Bihar. The party already has the State in its bag as it plays second fiddle to Nitish, but as is its modus operandi in all States, it plays second fiddle only till the time that it gobbles up, snake-like, its senior partner. Then it takes over. The RSS wants that to happen in Bihar, now.
The real prize, arguably, is West Bengal, which is due for an Assembly election less than a year from now, in March-April 2026. The BJP, and especially its so-called intellectuals (they are to books and ideas what Jay Shah is to cricket), get especially worked up over being bested by a Chief Minister from the Opposition, and that too, a woman. Mamata Banerjee has been able to ward off the RSS and the BJP, and now the effort is to hem her in. The SIR, etc., is merely a dry run for what will happen in the run-up to West Bengal's Assembly election, where Muslims make up 27 per cent of the electorate.
Dhankhar was earlier the Governor of West Bengal, but Mamata managed to see him off. Today, Dhankhar is a nobody; a man who unabashedly bowed before Modi, on camera, and who made all kinds of unparliamentary remarks to put down the Opposition, at Modi's behest, today could not even get warm words of farewell from his boss. He has been discarded like a used condom–and that should be a warning to other constitutional functionaries who seek to keep the regime happy. For now, it is good riddance to bad rubbish.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.