I have been watching the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls the way you watch a stain on a ceiling that you keep telling yourself you will get around to fixing before it brings the whole roof down, because the Election Commission announced it with all the ceremony of a routine housekeeping exercise back in October and people nodded along because everyone assumed it would only catch the other person and it has now been quietly erasing names for close to a year and most of the country still does not know the initials mean anything at all. SIR stands for Special Intensive Revision and what it does, stripped of the jargon, is send people door to door to make you prove you belong on the electoral roll where you have been enrolled, traceable back to a distant past revision, and if you cannot produce the right document for yourself and your parents and sometimes your grandparents your name goes and you become a suspect in the place you have voted in for decades.

The scale of it only becomes real when you look at Bengal, and even then the numbers refuse to line up in a way you can hold in your head, which I think is part of the point. Recent accounting puts the names cut from the West Bengal rolls at around twenty seven lakh, though the Election Commission’s own earlier final roll for the state claimed more than sixty three lakh were gone, and of those twenty seven lakh only about seven lakh people actually filed appeals before the tribunals set up to hear them, which is the number that keeps bothering me because it means that for every citizen who found a lawyer and a form and a way to raise her voice there were roughly three more who simply folded and disappeared from the democracy without a sound. The tribunals themselves are drowning under the weight of it, with close to thirty four lakh appeals piled in front of them and seven hundred and five judicial officers drafted in to chew through the backlog and somehow clearing more than thirty three lakh of them, and even the Supreme Court in August had to stop and ask the Election Commission for the data on how many of those appeals had actually been decided because nobody in the whole apparatus could say.

The part I have the hardest time swallowing is the courts, because the courts are supposed to be the one institution left that can catch the machinery when it runs the people over, and instead they blessed it. In May the Supreme Court upheld the entire special intensive revision as an advancement toward free and fair elections and held that it sat within the Representation of the People Act, and it even went so far as to send the names purged from the Bihar rolls to the Centre for adjudication, which is a very neat way of making sure the people who got erased have to fight citizenship itself to get their vote back, and then in the Bengal appeals the same court looked at the tribunals stuck with hundreds of thousands of pending cases and said it could not fix a timeline for them to decide, could not set a schedule for the people to get their electoral rights back. There is something almost tender about watching a judge tell a man he cannot promise when justice will arrive while a machine out there had no trouble at all deciding the day his name would fall off the list.

And this is where I have to say the thing about the names, because the Chief Justice of India is a man called Surya Kant and there is a very old proverb that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and here we are with a country whose highest judge is literally named after the sun sitting there unable to disinfect a single thing, presiding over tribunals that cannot set timelines and appeals that cannot be counted and an electorate being quietly shaved while the man with light in his name tells the roaches to keep coming back because he will not set a clock on them. It would be funny if it were not the whole story of the place, that we built a courtroom and named its ceiling lamp for the cure and the lamp does nothing but shine politely down on the rot. The judiciary has become the patron saint of the cockroaches, the crumbs king who keeps the whole show fed, because every purge and every purge-enabling judgment is handed down as due process and the people who run the machine know they can file a motion and sit on it for years and the saint in the sun-coloured robes will not rush them, and a beast that eats its crumbs and protects the feast spends its whole life doing exactly what a patron saint does, which is keeping the faithful fed and the faithful are the ones who feed it.

Then I go back to the number that should have ended the argument, which is that the country’s courts are already sitting on five point six four crore pending cases, roughly ninety six thousand of them in the Supreme Court with more than ten thousand of those older than a decade, about sixty lakh in the high courts where some have been waiting past thirty years, and the great dirty mass of the rest, close to five crore, buried in the district and subordinate courts where the poorest people go to wait for the justice that never comes. The structure already cannot breathe, already takes a lifetime to process a single grievance, and then you pour the SIR on top of it, because the first phase alone trimmed the rolls by more than eighty three lakh names across twelve states and the third phase has already crossed a crore and a half in deletions, and if even a fraction of those erased people manage an appeal the way the seven lakh in Bengal did you are talking about tens of lakhs of brand new cases landing on a docket that cannot finish the ones it already has and nobody has to squint very hard to see what that does.

What makes my stomach turn is doing the extrapolation, because SIR has been rolled out in waves and each wave covers a few more states and the second phase already carried away more than seven crore names across the country and the third is not done, and if Bengal with its twenty seven lakh deletions is a reasonable sample of what the whole country looks like then across the full national exercise you are staring at tens of crores of people asked to re-prove themselves and a meaningful slice of them forced to fight through the courts, which means a system that cannot clear the five point six four crore cases already in its lap being handed a fresh flood that will take not years but generations to drain, and the people who designed it know this and the people who approved it know this and the whole point was never to clean the rolls so much as to make the cleaning so expensive that only the people who can afford lawyers and identity papers survive it.

I keep coming back to the old story of Kalidas who climbs up and sits on the bough of a tree and starts sawing at the trunk right between himself and the tree, trimming the very limb he is sitting on because it is easier to reach, and the calf of it is that every stroke feels like progress toward a cleaner tree right up until the wood gives and the whole thing comes down with him still on it. The Indian judiciary is that man and the SIR is the saw and the tree is the fragile trust that the vote means something and that the courts will catch you when the state reaches for your name, and a court that endorses the erasure of millions of voters and then refuses to set a timeline for their appeals is chopping the exact branch that holds it up, because the only power a court has is the willingness of ordinary people to believe its word is the last one, and every citizen who loses her name and gets a shrug instead of a date is a little more of that tree falling away. The sun is supposed to be the thing that dries out the rot and kills the roaches and here the sun is holding the ladder for them, and I have spent enough of my life believing in institutions to know we are watching the bough give way from underneath the man who keeps insisting he is the one trimming the tree for its own good.

I used to think the judiciary was the last intact floor of this building and I have stopped thinking that, because a building full of struggling courts does not fall all at once, it falls one silent erasure at a time, one appeal that cannot be scheduled, one seven lakh who raised their hands against a twenty seven lakh who could not, and the man named for the sun sits at the top and disinfects nothing and the roaches keep breeding in the glow. I do not know anymore whether the tree falls or the man falls first, which I think is the only honest thing a person can say about it, that we are all sitting somewhere on that branch and the saw is going.

I want to know which of you thinks the courts will catch this before it catches all of us. I am @troysk704.