Voters in Bengal are caught in a dilemma. Whom do they vote for? Of the two chief contenders, one is mired in an unfolding saga of sleaze: above all the selling of government jobs in many sectors, most appallingly in school education. This has climaxed mid-election with over 25,000 persons losing their jobs, though many were no doubt genuinely appointed on merit. A far greater number who were denied jobs in the first place nurse an even deeper grievance. In fact, every citizen may be revolted by the sordid revelations of the last few years and the inept and partisan response of the state government.

So why not vote them out? Let us see what their chief rivals, currently ruling India, have on offer. In fact, their own offer — indeed ‘guarantee’ — has abruptly vanished from sight. Instead, they are harping on the manifesto of the nearest approach to a national Opposition party. But beguilingly, it is not the manifesto released by that party, whose text is plain to read. It is an elusive document with an alleged one-point agenda of communal division and minority appeasement. The prime minister himself launched the attack with a horrendously provocative image of mangalsutras snatched and the gold gifted to a particular community. One shudders to think of the nationwide consequences if such lurid fantasies strike root in the mass imagination.

So what do we resist with our votes — corruption or conflict, greed or malice — in full knowledge that to drive out the one is to let in the other? Even that is putting it too simply, for neither side has a monopoly on greed and violence. No doubt voters in other states face their own hard options. Everywhere, we exercise our franchise in something numbingly close to a choice between two or more evils.

Inevitably, we seek refuge in withdrawal and cynicism. Even those of us who go to vote feel we must guard our sanity by not engaging too deeply with the issues involved unless they really hit home, as with the aspiring schoolteacher cheated of a job or the family bulldozed out of its home. We may even feel we can ensure our own security by mentally siding with the latter’s tormentors. Months or years down the line, we find ourselves victimized in turn and learn too late that violence and exploitation never find closure. Having exhausted their initial prey, they turn upon their erstwhile supporters, dividing and attacking them selectively.

For the moment, the weatherbeaten Bengal voter shows no sign of fevered anguish in exercising a momentous choice. This is the most trivialized, mentally and morally disengaged election I have ever seen in Bengal. The steamy rhetoric spouted by politicians on the stump is utterly vaporous, as all steam must be. Beyond the lavish promise of freebies, they say nothing of how they envisage the nation’s future, or what they would actually do if voted to power. They often spend more time on a malicious parody of their opponents’ agenda than a serious statement of their own. The barbs they exchange reflect a uniform banality of outlook, like children thumbing their noses or sticking out their tongues at each other. Media coverage, especially on television, is largely taken up with such badinage, with little or no attempt to cover serious electoral issues. The slanging matches miscalled ‘debates’ reach their raucous crescendo at this time. In other countries, TV debates feature independent experts. In India, the chief and often only participants represent political parties. Their utterances — drowning out each other, often cheered on by a partisan anchor — are as coercive and obfuscating as on any other platform.

How does this affect the electorate? We cannot tell what goes on deep in the voters’ minds. But externally, they seem to waver between a silence that may or may not conceal disillusionment and indifference, and a kind of teashop banter like a scaled-down version of those TV debates. I will not talk about the social media because one cannot tell how much it reflects the genuine voices of citizens and how much is orchestrated or even machine-generated.

Let me return to that word ‘banality’. Hannah Arendt, survivor of a fascist regime and commentator on the Cold War era, talks of the “banality of evil”: a syndrome when common people, otherwise decent and sensible, become so inured to the evil in their society that it no longer disturbs them or even registers on them. This, says Arendt, is what happened to the German citizenry in Nazi times.

Let us reflect on some hard realities of contemporary India. ‘Mere’ corruption is no longer an electoral issue: we do not shun politicians because they might have their hands in the till or in our pockets. They may even terrorize an entire region, bleed the inhabitants and paralyse the administration for their gain. We are also reconciled to authoritarian governance, even to robbing fellow-citizens of their liberty. Some are in prison for alleged crimes against the State. Countless more, over 75% of India’s prison population, are awaiting trial for years for ‘ordinary’ offences.

These wrongs do not register on ‘us’, as we are not ‘them’. Martin Niemöller, another denizen of Nazi Germany, offers a chilling footnote to Arendt’s account. When ‘they’ came for communists, trade unionists and Jews, says Niemöller, he was silent, as he did not belong to those groups. At last they came for him, and there was no one to befriend him.

We hear it said that our democracy has been reduced to the holding of elections. If even the electoral process is now banalized, accepted by ourselves as a ritual irrelevant to our lives and well-being, we ensure our own undoing. We do not want our country to become a prison, nor a badland where those who should be imprisoned roam free. In fact, these are two aspects of one and the same dispensation. Let us use our fleeting power as electors to save ourselves from such a fate.

Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University