-Rachit Raj Somani
Considering the political highlights in the country (like I.N.D.I.A.); the university records of students’ voter ID registration and our council elections a few days back, we felt it was crucial to revisit the importance of ‘one’s vote’. We wanted to emphasize and initiate conversations about the importance of voting because all of us are the newest members of the electoral body. We wanted to open this up through the ideas of majoritarianism and privilege because all of us have felt an air of disinterest and disdain regarding political discussions in our batches, which more often than not, stem from unacknowledged and interrogated privilege. The interactive nature of the assembly was curated around major implications and the election process that elections and voting have had in the past. The intention was simply to make people engage first hand in the process of voting on crucial issues, to provoke and instigate self introspection.
The first activity was a ‘privilege walk’. It is an exercise aimed at helping one realize and understand their privilege by posing them in relation to others, followed by a carefully curated questionnaire regarding everyday instances that shifts from person to person based on their privilege and that remains unnoticed by most. First, we conducted the exercise with a random group of students, in front of everybody, who were given a series of keywords that build a fake persona. The keywords belonged to the most common forms of privilege observed in our context like caste, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation and physical disability. The affected, of each question, take a step forward/backward as per the conditions. The forced self introspection because of the pseudo-identities was strong, because of which we repeated the questionnaire, but this time, it was posed to everyone present in the room, to be answered for themselves and realize their privilege.
Post this, the concept of majoritarianism and the importance of voting were discussed through a mock election campaign. The aim of the exercise was to carry forward the understanding of privilege from the previous exercise and put people in conditions to vote and provoke or instigate self introspection. As hosts, we prepared scenarios for the people to vote ranging from national, state, city, society, to the level of an educational institute. There was a deliberate attempt to revisit instances of difference or privilege that we know about in the scenarios to provoke the student body. Each scenario was presented as an election campaign between two or three candidates, and the student body was asked to assume roles and pseudo-identities of key demographics affected in those particular scenarios. The exercise also led to a discussion about the privileged and disconnected nature of most of our student body, where the importance of one’s own political viewpoints and privilege still remains neglected.
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