Betwixt and Between the Ballot: An Anthropologist in the Returning Officer’s Chair

When I assumed role as Returning Officer cum SDM for the local body elections, I did not expect my anthropological lens to become my most useful equipment. Yet the moment the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) came into force, I found myself standing inside a phenomenon I had only read about in the books. What follows are three observations from that stint, read through the lens of the discipline that taught me to see the familiar as strange.

I. The Liminal State of Democracy Suspended

The period between the dissolution of an elected local body and the swearing-in of the next is a peculiar interregnum. Once the MCC is in place, the developmental machinery freezes. No new work orders can be issued, no fresh schemes announced, no foundation stones laid. The old representatives have departed; the new ones have not yet arrived. The administration governs, but only as a caretaker holding the threshold.

This is precisely what Arnold van Gennep called the liminal phase in his Rites of Passage (1909) — the “betwixt and between” condition where one is no longer what one was, but not yet what one will become. Victor Turner developed this further in The Ritual Process (1969), describing liminality as a state of ambiguity and structural invisibility, where normal social hierarchies dissolve and a strange suspension takes hold. Turner’s insight that liminal entities are “neither here nor there” captured my office perfectly: the village awaited representation, files awaited signatures, and everyone shared the same low hum of anxiety and impatience that Turner associated with those caught at the threshold.

The frustration I witnessed — from contractors, citizens, and even officials — was not mere bureaucratic delay. It was the structural anxiety of liminality itself: the discomfort of being suspended between two stable orders, waiting for communitas to crystallise once again into structure.

II. The Vernacularisation of Democracy

Textbook democracy assumes an abstract, rational individual voter. What I observed on the ground was something richer and messier — democracy translated into the local idiom of kinship, caste, and community networks.

The anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen, in his work on democratic politics in India, and the broader literature on “vernacular democracy” describe exactly this: the way formal democratic institutions get absorbed, reshaped, and given meaning through local social structures. Mukulika Banerjee, in Why India Votes? (2014), shows how Indian voters invest the act of voting with deep moral and social meaning, far beyond instrumental calculation. Voting becomes a performance of dignity, belonging, and reciprocity.

Political mobilisation, I noticed, ran along the grooves of pre-existing social networks. Candidates did not campaign to atomised individuals; they activated biradari (brotherhood), caste associations, and kinship webs. This echoes F.G. Bailey’s classic Politics and Social Change (1963), which demonstrated how local Indian politics operates through factions and patron-client networks rather than ideology. The “vote bank,” a term coined by M.N. Srinivas, was visible not as a slur but as a sociological reality — the way democracy is vernacularised, to borrow Sally Engle Merry’s term for how global concepts are translated into local frameworks of meaning.

III. Lota-Namak: Tradition at the Ballot’s Edge

Among the most striking practices I encountered was the invocation of Lota-Namak — the ritual oath taken upon water vessel and salt, a traditional pledge of loyalty and truth-telling. Candidates and supporters would bind their commitments through such customary oaths, sometimes carrying more weight in the community than any written affidavit filed before me.

Here lies a genuine anthropological tension. The modern democratic order rests on the secret ballot, written law, and the impersonal authority of the state. Yet customary oaths like Lota-Namak operate on an entirely different register — that of sacred sanction, honour, and communal witness. Émile Durkheim’s notion of the sacred and the collective conscience helps explain their force: these rituals derive authority not from the state but from the shared moral community itself. Bronisław Malinowski, in Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), similarly showed how binding obligation in society often rests on reciprocity and ritual rather than on codified law.

The salt itself is significant. To “be true to one’s salt” (namak halal) is a deep South Asian moral idiom of loyalty and gratitude. The persistence of such practices alongside electoral law illustrates what anthropologists call legal pluralism — the coexistence of state law and customary normative orders. The modern democratic value of the free, secret, individual vote sits in quiet negotiation with an older ethic of publicly witnessed, ritually sanctioned loyalty.

Conclusion

My stint in the Returning Officer’s chair was, unexpectedly, fieldwork. The liminal freeze of the MCC period, the vernacular grammar of caste and kinship in mobilisation, and the endurance of rituals like Lota-Namak all revealed that Indian democracy is not a foreign graft but a living institution continuously reshaped by indigenous social logic. As anthropologists from van Gennep to Banerjee remind us, the formal and the customary do not simply oppose one another — they entangle, negotiate, and together produce the texture of grassroots democratic life.