I will never write my autobiography, simply because a singularly inconsequential life can hardly be written about. But I do remember with pride one significant moment in my life, when my generation, Midnight’s Children, turned 21 in 1968. Free India also turned 21. As part of the wonderful celebrations the government gave us a certificate that validated our status as the first citizens of independent India. I can recollect but not properly articulate what I felt at that moment.My heart swelled with pride because I now had political and moral status in my country. More importantly, I formed an integral part of the first political community of citizens in independent India. My fellow citizens belonged to me and I to them. I could now vote and reiterate my status as a citizen in a free country (the voting age then was 21 years).That was also the moment I could fully grasp what the people of France must have felt in 1789. The Revolution transformed them from subjects of King Louis XI to ‘Citoyen’ of the revolutionary republic. William Wordsworth wrote, ‘Bliss was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven’.The poem was incorporated into his autobiography The Prelude. The French invocation of “liberty, equality, fraternity” gained fame and acquired universal status. It has been adopted by many constitutions including ours. Notably, France became a full democracy only in 1944 when women got the vote.The early part of the 20th century was marked by hundreds of protest movements by women demanding the right to vote across Europe and the United Kingdom. A democracy without universal adult franchise is hollow, it only becomes substantive when all adults are given the right to vote.India under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gone into reverse gear. Consider how the Indian government has implemented the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) Project. We, the first citizens of independent India, are being asked to prove our claim to citizenship! The very idea of asking us to prove that we are citizens of a country we love, work for and identify with is brazen. It is impertinent. But it is cynical and clever, too, and designed to fashion a constituency that would cater to the ruling party.The outcome was predetermined. The countrywide application of SIR disenfranchised huge numbers of citizens including the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Estimates hold that 13 crore Indians were struck off electoral rolls.Denial, or fear of denial of the right to vote, which forms the core of the concept of democratic citizenship, set off tremors of anxiety and alienation. We witnessed this earlier when our courageous university students took out huge processions against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019/2000.Today once again, people across the country are up in arms because a deeply flawed election commission and an unbearably cynical and amoral government appear to have fixed elections to benefit the ruling party and disbenefit the Opposition. Or so it is alleged by several competent authorities on the constitution and on elections.Also read: Violence, Intimidation and Terror in Delhi: Modi Govt’s Panic Radiates Through the Capital’s StreetsWhat is clear is that the SIR is a brazen effort to expel voters who do not belong to the religious constituency our ruling party caters for, and those Hindus who did not vote for the party in the last few elections. The electoral constituency had to be refashioned to include only supporters of the ruling party. Perhaps the ruling party did not foresee the upshot of this barefaced attempt to narrow down the electoral constituency. It underestimated the manner in which the franchise holds hearts and mind in a firm grip.There is no right that is more prized in democratic hearts than the right to vote. Expectedly, protests erupted in waves over the past week and the massive meeting called on October 10 was to be a culmination of those protests. A panic-stricken government ran for cover. It sheltered behind policemen armed with lathis studded with nails and guns.College students demonstrate in support of the CJP call for protests against the ECI and the Union government, in Patiala, October 10, 2026. Photo: PTITrains to Delhi were halted, barricades erected and metro-stations closed. But a determined citizenry walked across the country to attend the ‘Delhi Chalo’ protest meeting. This was the biggest challenge to the legitimacy of the government launched by the people in 79 years of India’s post-colonial history.What is it about citizenship, or more precisely the right to vote, that arouses such strong and combustible emotions? What brings people together across class and community to fight for this valued right against a state that has added terrible dimensions to the notion of coercion? For one, Indians understand that citizenship is intrinsic to democracy. Without rights, they will be once again reduced to subjects, this time not of the British Empire but of the ‘Empire of Oligarchs’ that the ruling party has fashioned out of a democracy that now lies in shreds.Two, the right to vote enables membership of the political community. Members of the political community cluster around the sanctity of the Constitution of India. The constitution gives them the right to freedom of expression. This right includes the right to engage with the power of the state, to ask questions, to cast doubt about the political morality of a policy or an act, to protest, to challenge and to disobey. These modes of protest are always non-violent and peaceful. The means used by the government to counter them signify the high point of violence.Our young people, who were peacefully demonstrating at Jantar Mantar on July 20, 2026 wanted to walk to Parliament. They were stopped not only by the police but by masked goons wielding lathis embedded with sharp iron nails. They singled out young women, and besides attacking them physically, touched them inappropriately. “Inappropriately” is a tame description of what our young women were forced to endure; nothing less than the playing out of sick sexual fantasies of these masked goons.Also read: ‘Entire Nation Has a Problem With Modi’: Dhruv Rathee, Abhijeet Dipke, Prakash Raj Participate in Anti-SIR Protest in BengaluruThe narrowing down of the electoral constituency, the sheer brutal coercion launched against protestors, and the turning of Delhi into a city under occupation is meant to prevent political participation.Notably, without the participation of citizens, through many modes, including protests, democratic institutions atrophy. The government slides into authoritarianism. Franchise rights, or the right to vote and the right to stand for elections, is the distinctive feature of citizenship. An individual right (to vote) determines the future of a political community. Franchise rights recognise our political competence to choose who we wish be ruled by. This right is universal. It has to be universal for India because the Preamble of the Constitution promises equality.It is difficult to believe that the right-wing reads Bertolt Brecht or reads anything; its members glory in their illiteracy and mediocrity. But we do, and we recognise that the SIR mirrors the concluding lines of the wonderfully satirical poem written by Brecht in 1953: ‘The Historical Event’. He wrote this poem in the context of the uprising in East Germany in the same year. Brecht wrote:‘Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another.’Police detain protesters joining the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) call against SIR and the CEC, in the R.K. Ashram area, New Delhi, Sunday, October 11, 2026. Photo: PTI/Salman AliBut in India, the aftermath of dissolving and reconstituting the people has been nothing less than spectacular. Why should the people not be furious at the exclusion of crores of people from the electoral rolls? It is time for us to throw the SIR into the polluted waters of the Ganges, to be eaten up by big and small fish. Generations will remember the exercise in “voters’ revision”. It will go down in history as one of the blackest periods in our country.Why should the people not be angry at this audacious attempt to ‘dissolve the people’? Elections are a significant moment in the creation of a new political dispensation, the revitalisation of politics and the strengthening of the constitutional foundations of democracy. Above all, they play a significant role in reiterating the political competence of the political public. They must be based on universal franchise. This justifies protest.Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.