Contrived arguments against the anti-CEC protests

There were two important articles last week about the protests in Delhi against CEC Gyanesh Kumar (among many, many more). One was an article in The Indian Express by Sumit Agarwal, professor of finance at National University of Singapore and president of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research, and Shashwat Alok, associate professor of finance, Indian School of Business. It argued, nonsensically, that the protests impose disproportionate economic costs on the poor and risk undermining the electoral mandate through what it called their coercive actions.

The other article appeared in Newslaundry, where journalist M. Rajshekhar recalled what he witnessed when the Delhi Police detained him along with protestors for several hours on October 10, including the fact that despite police claims, personnel were indeed illegally beating protestors inside roving vans fit with inhumane enclosures.

What the IE piece got wrong

1. It confuses disruptions imposed by the state with those imposed by the protestors. The government preemptively closed 45 metro stations in the city and restricted road and rail transport along certain routes. But Agarwal and Alok blame these closures on the protestors.
2. In their accounting of social costs, Agarwal and Alok have for some reason excluded the costs of state violence. Rajshekhar's account in Newslaundry described systematic beatings inside police vans, arbitrary detentions, phones confiscated without reason, and medical assistance deliberately delayed or withheld. Even The Indian Express's own reporting has documented injuries, including a fracture, so why its editors published this article is puzzling.
   
   (Or maybe not: an important trigger for the continuing protests is The Indian Express report written by Ritika Chopra that detailed unconstitutional actions by CEC Kumar to keep the probably-fraudulent Special Intensive Revision going, and the publisher is trying to strike a 'balance' now to mitigate the heat on itself.)
3. According to Agarwal and Alok, the poor can only be victims of protest and they assume most of the costs of disruption. But poorer citizens also suffer from — or suffer more from — institutional failures and also participate in protests, and stand to benefit from political accountability. Do we know that their interest in affordable transport does not supersede their interest in protecting their right to vote?
4. The article's economic evidence is weak. The authors' estimates concern the sales lost due to market closures but that is not synonymous with estimates of lost economic output. Agarwal and Alok acknowledge this distinction but then proceed to invoke an ASSOCHAM estimate of losses during the farmers' agitation, without a corresponding estimate of the actual net economic losses attributable to the protestors (in a way that is also mindful of the distinction made in the first point).
5. Agarwal's and Alok's evidence that prolonged political strikes in Bangladesh reduced the probability of firms being able to meet their export commitments can't be extended to the economic consequences of what are much shorter demonstrations in Delhi. The protest tactics, socio-economic setting, and the institutional circumstances also differ, and the authors do not describe any sort of method to calculate the costs of such protests.
6. The authors misapply the economic concept of hold-ups: their portrayal of the mobilisation of opposition parties as an attempt to extract concessions their electoral defeat denied them is a strawman because demanding the integrity of electoral rolls is not synonymous in any measure to demanding the government implement a political programme.
7. Agarwal and Alok identify courts, Parliament, and the Election Commission of India as the proper forums for grievances but overlook the fact that that doesn't mean protest is not an independent democratic right, and not only as a last resort after all other institutional mechanisms have failed. Where the people dispute the conduct of an institution itself, contending they return to it and not seek other recourse available to them is stupid.
   
   (I imagine one has to twist oneself in such terrible knots to find fault with the protestors rather than with the state.)
8. The authors' invoking M.K. Gandhi is a red herring. Gandhi suspended the Non-Cooperation Movement after protestors set fire to a police station and killed 22 policemen; he didn't suspend it because civil disobedience was an inconvenience to traders or commuters! In fact, economic disruption and violence are very different things and the former is also supposed to be inconvenient. What at all is a "convenient protest"? The existence of universal adult franchise does not quash the legitimacy of civil disobedience in a democratic country.
9. Agarwal and Alok presume to dictate protesting students' political priorities. Students can campaign on several issues, including electoral integrity. In fact, students have shaped modern India in crucial ways by participating in the freedom struggle and by leading the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu and the JP movement in Bihar. Even against the BJP's Hindutva programme, one of the first public protests was by students at the Film and Television Institute of India. Thereafter there have been many such protests across the country, each one reminding the government the people are not turning a blind eye to its religious majoritarianism and its craven disenfranchising tendencies. Claiming political attention is scarce can't justify vouchsafing for economists alone the authority to decide which grievances citizens should prioritise.
10. In similar vein, Agarwal and Alok have trumped up a threat to the electoral mandate, with their concluding warning that mobilising in the streets can't confer a mandate to govern addressing a proposition no one, the protestors least of all, is advancing. To demand accountability and the resignation of a constitutional office-bearer is not the same as claiming the right to govern. The distinction is in fact foundational to a representative democracy.