Bihar SIR and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’: Yogendra Yadav on ‘politician’s logic’

In a short clip shared on social media on 29 August, Saturday, Yogendra Yadav — one of the now long list of petitioners to the Supreme Court against the way the special intensive revision (SIR) of the voter list is being conducted in poll-bound Bihar — recounted a small scene from the popular BBC sitcom Yes, Minister (and referred also to its successor in political satire, Yes, Prime Minister):

Prime Minister: “Something needs to be done!”

Secondary character: “Here is something...”

Third character: “So we must do it!”

The reel continues to point up the “old logical fallacy — all cats have four legs; my dog has four legs... Therefore my dog is a cat”.

The clip continues to a conversation between two characters:

Character 1: “He’s suffering from politician’s logic.”

Character 2: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”

Character 1: But doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing.” [emphasis in subtitle]

Yadav continues to say, “And no one checks if this ‘something’ is what needs to be done.”

“This is exactly the problem with all that is being said about Rahul Gandhi,” the activist suggests.

For, Rahul Gandhi has alleged that the voter’s list is “defective”, he explains, “so something needs to be done; here is SIR, so SIR must be supported!”

“And no one bothers to ask one elementary question,” he continues: “Is SIR that something that needs to be done?”

“No, it’s not,” contends Yadav, in a tone that suggests this is patently obvious, surely.

He argues that in order to “improve” the voters’ list, we do actually, “yes... need special measures; yes, you need to go door to door for personal verification, physical verification — but that’s not SIR!”

SIR adds to this required process of voter list amendment “two special things”, says the activist: “steroid or poison: (1) it says everyone must fill a form, and if you don’t fill a form by a certain date, your name won’t be included (this has never happened in India!); and (2) it says you must give documents — everyone must have documents to prove their Indian citizenship — and [the] documents being demanded are those we know [emphasis Yadav’s] people don’t have!”

“That,” he concludes, “is what makes SIR not a solution but a part of the problem.”

Yadav's contention in this clip is not far off from eminent economist and intellectual Amartya Sen’s from a week ago, that it doesn’t make sense for the Election Commission of India to try and “justify seven new mistakes to correct one”, when he warned that the Bihar SIR seeks disenfranchising the poor and marginalised citizens of the state in particular because of the way it had been designed and executed.