There is a dark joke from 1930s Germany where a Jewish man finds a friend – another Jewish man – reading a Nazi-aligned newspaper. “Why are you reading that bilge???” he shouts. The friend calmly puts down the paper and points to a pile of serious papers. “In those,” the friend says, “all I read about is pogroms against our people, threats of disenfranchisement, who we can marry, where we can live.” Picking up the Nazi paper, he says, “In this, we control industry, finances, whole countries!” He grins, “I have never felt we are so powerful.”Watching the breakdown of the Election Commission, it is hard not to recall that joke. The unstated – actually sometimes openly stated – goal of much of the shenanigans was to clear the electoral of anti-BJP voters. Since that is an amorphous category, the easier target has been purging Muslim names from the electoral polls through a series of complaints. There is a rough logic to this, of course. If your politicians and allied groups spend all your political capital dehumanising and attacking Muslims, it is pretty unlikely that they are going to vote for you, so maybe better not to have them vote at all. The challenge, of course, is that this is illegal. Worse, it is difficult. And even worse, it is difficult to hide. Using power for patently illegal means ends up damaging, or even destroying, the institution you use to implement them, or as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ally and Union minister Chirag Paswan said, “If questions are being raised on Election Commission, which is an independent constitutional body, responsibility lies with CEC to present his stance clearly. It is problematic if people begin to doubt electoral process itself.”Also read: SIR: Over 4,000 Form 7 Applications Submitted in Karnataka, Most Seek Removal of Muslim NamesIn short, it seems that the powers-that-be have decided to gamble the credibility of the whole electoral system – arguably independent India’s greatest achievement after raising enough food to feed its population – simply to nullify the impact of some Muslim voters. But, really, have Muslim voters ever really mattered in Indian politics?Amartya Sen’s great insight in his 1999 book Development as Freedom argued that functional democracies give people the ability to address and critique their political problems. This means that no political problem becomes too acute. His great line was that there have never been any famines in a functioning democracy. How does this apply for Muslims in India, who have faced murderous pogroms from 1961 onwards, whether Bhopal, Bhagalpur, Nellie, Advani’s Rath Yatra, Bombay, Godhra, Muzaffarnagar, Delhi, and a host of others. How does one reconcile the killing of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people over most of the history of the country with no justice, no corrective mechanism, and no let-up with a democracy where these people have an electoral impact?The only evidence of the impact of Muslim electoral influence on this long history of organised violence is from Steven Wilkinson’s 2006 book, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Possibly the most comprehensive look at mob violence and electoral impact in India, it argues that in Indian states with multi-party competition, the slim impact of Muslim votes leads to state machinery acting a little quicker to contain mob violence. That is it. Not that there is justice, not that there is any dismantling of the machinery to engineer violence, not that the political actors who engineer violence fail. This is what the sum of what the vote has given Muslims, that in a few states authorities act just a bit quicker while they are being killed, so fewer die. Until next time.Also read: Bengal SIR: What the Patterns of Exclusion for Muslim, Scheduled Caste and Urban Voters Say(I am not even going to get into Kashmir, which has been run as a managed democracy, or an anti-democracy, since the jailing of Sheikh Abdullah in 1952, where arbitrary imprisonment, suspension of rights, torture, and murder are taken for granted by a bigoted country.)If Sen’s hypothesis is correct – and it is pretty robust – then the Muslim voter has never really mattered anyway. We can see this in multiple ways – with political parties, even of the Opposition, taking great care never to raise so-called “Muslim” issues, even if they are basic issues of right to life, freedom of expression, right to marry, right to eat. People will point to the Shah Bano issue and how the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government pushed through the stupid Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986. There are three important caveats: firstly, there was no proof that the Muslim community as a whole wanted this – in fact significant parts of it opposed it. Secondly, there was no vote on this among Muslims and there is no evidence it had any electoral impact other than against the Congress and decades of vilification against Muslims for something they never voted for. Lastly, the defence of divorced Muslim men not to pay maintenance to their divorced wives – pathetic on its own terms – is not a constitutional right. It is the concern of a minuscule minority of Muslim men, and is incomparable to the rights of life, liberty, and expression which impact everybody.Also read: How a Campaign Against Muslim Voter Deletions – Aided by a Report on The Wire – Forced the Election Commission to ActThe other thing that this focus on Muslim voters gets wrong is that Muslim voters are fairly comfortable voting for whoever is winning, just as long as that person is not virulently anti-Muslim. This comes to the other problem of limiting Muslim electoral power as a key to keeping BJP in power. The majority of Indians have consistently voted for parties other than the BJP, whether Muslim or not. Maybe disenfranchising Muslims will lead to a change of a percentage point or two – and those percentage points matter in tight contests where the winner needs only 35% of the votes counted to win – but the BJP’s problems are with a larger India that it has failed. People without dignified jobs or prospects of such, fed up with the blatant corruption and criminality of those in power, cannot be merely tweaked out of the system. And as the tweaking becomes more obvious, as it has with the Election Commission, it is generating even more distrust and disgust with the BJP among Indians as a whole, not just Muslims, whose vote has not really mattered anyway. Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.