Why India’s Opposition Parties Should Boycott Elections

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There is fresh buzz in India over boycotting elections in the wake of fresh media reports over its Election Commission’s voter verification methods resulting in the disenfranchisement of 130 million people—more than Japan’s population—and dubious electoral outcomes favouring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

This time the buzz is a bit louder than last year when I began to write about the case for boycotting elections in Indian media (pieces here and here), arguing that by participating in elections, the opposition parties were only legitimising the same theft of mandate that they were protesting against. India’s meme-inspired Gen Z protest group, the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party, is now making the same point, mainstreaming a view that has been lurking in the fringes.

The boycott idea has found limited traction among opposition parties. They have their reasons. The most obvious being the fear the BJP will proceed with elections all the same. The opposition then loses whatever limited access to state resources and means of patronage they have, and, with that, their ability to keep their organizations engaged and relevant. Basically, hand the rulers a blank cheque and sign their own death warrant.

Also, to be successful, a boycott would have to be a unified opposition move, in itself a Herculean task for a perennially bickering and mutually suspicious lot with conflicting interests. And, most importantly, an election boycott would have to come with a civil disobedience agitation of collective refusal, obstructions, strikes, marches, sit-ins, and voluntary arrests, possibly for months on.

With their severely withered organisations, opposition parties have no capacity for such an enterprise. Like everywhere else, Indian mass parties have become far less embedded in society as their mobilization wings like unions and other civic networks have diminished. And, as political theorists Richard Katz and Peter Mair write in Democracy and the Cartelization of Political Parties, when parties become less rooted in society, they become more appendages of the state. State resources and means of patronage—even in crumbs—matter a lot. Especially since the cost of fighting elections has skyrocketed; more money is now spent in elections in India than in the US.

Growing dependence on the state also makes parties less inclined towards disruptive mass movements and more invested in stability. So, Indian opposition parties have now landed in this rather strange place wherein they keep telling the people that the elections are rigged, but they should vote for them all the same.

All recent elections have been rigged, they say, casting a doubt on the legitimacy of all elected legislators and governments in the centre and the states—including their own. The logical course of action once such an assertion has been made would be to pull out their own parties’ legislators at every level and dismantle the governments in states where they are in power, demand the BJP does the same, and resort to civil disobedience till it does; then start the process afresh, this time with institutional amendments to ensure clean elections. Because, if elections are being rigged, the republic is a lie.

So far, the opposition parties have seemed to prefer a stable lie. They have their reasons. One study of 171 threatened and actual election boycotts between 1990 and 2009 shows it worked in only four percent of the cases. Alejandro Toledo’s boycott in Peru in the early 2000s drove Alberto Fujimori from power, but in an overwhelmingly high number of other cases, boycotts entrenched the ruler, as in the case of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

Such studies are hardly definitive, though. First off, these outcomes are mostly short-term. The long-term consequences of election boycotts are far more contested, with some studies indicating better chances of electoral reforms  and a significantly higher likelihood of an incumbent losing in a future election because of the instability inherent in illegitimate governments.

But the biggest problem with all such studies is that they treat sample countries as comparable units even though democratic crisis in every country is unique, shaped by its own stage of democratic evolution, civic culture, and its place in the global imagination. Those who argue that Modi can become a Mugabe if the opposition walks away grossly underestimate India on all three counts. An officially undemocratic Indian government would be internally illegitimate and externally unpalatable. Overall, unstable and unworkable. No Indian government can risk it.

Even in terms of party strategy, every argument against election boycotts can be turned on its head to make exactly the opposite point. If organisational weakness supposedly renders opposition parties incapable of waging long struggles, it is exactly why they need it—to stir up their bases and breathe life into their hollowed out organisations. Protest movements give rudderless parties a purpose, mobilize voters, energise the grass-roots, find new political talents, and rebuild party ties to society. There’s little not to like here; Modi is offering the chance of a lifetime.

If the argument is that a boycott will only make things worse for the opposition, one has to wonder just how? Parliament sessions are already a joke, the BJP has emasculated the legislature, the media, the judiciary, and every level of the executive. Probe agencies are used freely to intimidate and coerce. The party now controls 22 of the 28 states with 78 percent of the population, making India almost a one-party state. In parts of the country, it’s worse. In the eastern state of Bengal,  the BJP now controls both the government and the opposition in the state, having peeled away almost the entirety of the previous governing party’s top leadership after winning the state election in May. Bengal is a one-party state; it can’t get any worse.

Situations like these should naturally lend themselves to radical thinking. But India’s opposition parties keep calling this moment an unprecedented democratic crisis and an existential threat to the republic, yet prefer to operate like it’s business as usual.

An election boycott is a no-brainer. But if the penny still hasn’t dropped for the opposition parties, they—especially the Congress—can simply ask themselves what the nation’s founding leaders they are so fond of invoking would do if they were around today. What would Gandhi do?

Would Gandhi look at the disenfranchisement of millions of people, the gamed elections, the oppression of Muslims, the flagrant use of state power, and the disfiguring of governing institutions, and say, “let’s work with the system and see how it goes”? Between garlanding his statues and delivering boring speeches evoking his dreams on his birth anniversary this October 2, if opposition leaders took a moment to contemplate what Gandhi would do in this moment, they would find the clarity they have been lacking.

In sum, the debate over election boycotts is really quite simple. The thing is, when a democracy reaches a stage where the opposition participates in elections even though it knows they are manipulated, we are already in the territory of managed democracy. By now, elections are mostly a performative ritual to legitimise power rather than a real competition for it. Now, whether one prefers an electoral boycott and the associated disruption depends on whether one has made one’s peace with this status quo or not. Gandhi would never have.

Related articles:

Hollow Parties in India’s Cockroach-Eaten Democracy (10-minute read)

India’s Cockroaches Have a Message for the World (3-minute read)

Cockroaches Crawl Over Decaying Parties in Modi’s Parallel Universe (3-minute read)

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