The recent rejection of my Rajya Sabha nomination gave me food for thought. Resistance cannot be just external, I thought — it must stem from an inner churn, a search for the truth. Without that churn, an act of resistance is mere spectacle, a reactionary outburst. Minus the intent to seek the truth, resistance is raw violence; it cannot give voice to a demand for rights.

While there are no lingering doubts anymore about the integrity of the Election Commission of India or the transparency of the electoral process, certain questions still gnawed at my conscience. The rejection of my Rajya Sabha nomination stunned everyone and exposed yet again the authoritarianism that has overwhelmed our democracy. Yet, this wasn’t the first time the tendency had bared itself. Initially no one paid heed, opportunism was even celebrated as political expediency, and those left behind in the process were dismissed as fools.

The tendency was already manifest when Madhya Pradesh, the state I come from, effectively stopped elections to the state’s APMCs (Agricultural Produce Market Committees) or mandis back in 2013. (The elected committees completed their terms in 2018, and the state government has kept deferring these elections ever since, placing the management of the mandis under state-appointed administrators. When this happened, we kept mum, I must concede.

The mandi is not an insignificant institution, not secondary to the Rajya Sabha in my reckoning. This is where the fate of a farmer’s produce is decided. A farmer’s voice rarely reaches the ministry of commerce, but it used........

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