Right to abstain must also be incorporated
Certain ideas should never even be considered; making voting mandatory is one of them. So, it is sad to know that the Supreme Court favours it. The apex court said some mechanism needs to be devised, not necessarily punitive, to make voting compulsory. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was hearing a PIL by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, which argued for making Nota (the ‘none of the above’ option given to voters) a candidate in the constituencies where only one candidate is in the fray to find out whether the lone contestant enjoyed the confidence of voters. In fact, compulsory voting is an old idea favoured by the Sangh Parivar.
Then Narendra Modi’s government in Gujarat had in 2014 introduced it in the Gujarat Local Authorities Laws (Amendment) Bill. It was supported by veteran leader L K Advani and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Gujarat Assembly had cleared the Bill earlier too, but it was rejected by the Congress-appointed governor. When Modi became Prime Minister, he appointed a Bharatiya Janata Party leader O P Kohli as governor, who duly cleared the Bill. Apparently, the mandatory provision has not resulted in any punitive action against non-voters.
The Gujarat civic body polls in February last year recorded an average voter turnout of 57 per cent across regions. None of the 43 per cent of people who didn’t vote was penalised. For other elections, too, no penal action has been reported by the media. But this is not a happy situation, for the state government is empowered to exercise its power against those who don’t vote. This means that it can choose arbitrarily against whom it has to take action.
A selectively enforceable law is more troubling than one that is uniformly applied. When a government possesses the authority to penalise non-voters but chooses not to do so routinely, it retains the option of targeting individuals or groups at its convenience. Arbitrary empowerment of the state is never good news. Liberal democracy thrives on restraint—restraint by the state and trust in the citizen. The expansion of state authority into domains of personal choice, even in the name of civic or democratic virtue, upsets that balance. As it is, this is the state that prohibits the consumption of alcohol, which is an encroachment on the domain of the individual.
More encroachment to promote a democratic virtue will further belittle citizens. Also, today a non-implementable law may lie dormant; tomorrow it may be invoked. The mere existence of discretionary coercive power can chill political freedom, subtly altering how citizens perceive their rights. If the goal is to strengthen democracy, the answer lies elsewhere: improving electoral transparency, ensuring internal party democracy, reducing the influence of money power, and making governance more accountable.
Citizens who feel heard and respected are more likely to vote voluntarily. Participation inspired by conviction is infinitely more valuable than participation extracted by compulsion. Compulsory voting may appear morally appealing to some, but beneath the veneer lies a troubling expansion of state power. In a liberal democracy, the right to choose must include the right to abstain. Once that principle is compromised, the architecture of freedom begins to weaken—not with a dramatic collapse, but with a quiet, incremental surrender of autonomy.
