The roadshow state: 40 kilometres of theatre, zero kilometres of answers

The roadshow is over. Forty kilometres of waving, garlands and slow-moving vans from Dharapuram to Mulanur — and then, by 6 pm on Sunday, the statutory silence that the Election Commission imposes on everyone, even Chief Ministers. The spectacle has been switched off. What remains switched on is the question the spectacle was built to drown out: what, exactly, has this government done with power? Consider what the voter in Dharapuram is being asked to bless. A bypoll that the ruling party manufactured by luring away the sitting AIADMK legislators, resigning their mandates like used tickets. A campaign conducted almost entirely as theatre — tractor drives, roadshows, helicopter hops — while the state's basic machinery stutters. And hovering over the entire exercise, allegations that the inducement economy reached all the way down to tiffin boxes, six thousand rupees in cash, silver coins and a "Victory Cup" for the voter — allegations carried on a candidate's phone, shown to an election officer who, she says, did nothing. This is the roadshow state: governance as performance, mandates as property to be purchased. Periyar would have recognised the mechanism instantly — the theft of self-respect, first by making the representative a commodity to be poached, then by making the voter a commodity to be bought. Anna called the ballot the weapon of the powerless; what do you call it when the powerful arrive at the polling booth having already priced the powerless? The ruling party will point to crowds. Crowds are cheap; a government that cannot run power lines and law-and-order without drama can still run a van through a town. The measure of a mandate is not the kilometre count of the roadshow but the decibel count of the answers — and on the cash-for-votes petitions sitting unanswered before the Election Commission, this government has been silent. Tuesday's voters in two reserved constituencies — among the most marginalised communities in the state — deserve better than to be treated as an audience. Whether they deliver a verdict or a coronation, the result on October 9 will answer a simpler question than the roadshow asked: can a mandate be assembled in a market, or must it still be earned?