Essay · Section A30 September 2026

The absence of dissent is not the presence of consent.

Perid, a village of about 3,000 people in Kolhapur district, has not held a contested panchayat election since 1956. A visitor could read this as democracy at its best: a village so united that it no longer needs a ballot. A former sarpanch of the region, Alka Kamble, gave a less comfortable reading. In such villages, she said, the seats reserved for Dalit and backward-class women go to candidates “who will not raise their voices”. The two readings describe the same silence. When no one objects, we cannot yet tell whether people have agreed, or whether they were not asked, did not know, or did not dare.

This essay argues that silence is evidence of nothing until we know what produced it. Consent has three conditions: refusal must be possible, the person must know enough to refuse, and refusing must not cost more than complying. Where any one of these is missing, the absence of dissent is a record of power, not of agreement. A State that reads silence as assent governs on a signature it has forged. A mature State does something harder: it builds the conditions under which silence could honestly mean yes.

The oldest version of the error is political. In Tacitus’s Agricola, the Caledonian chief Calgacus says of Rome: “they make a solitude and call it peace.” Soviet elections, with one approved candidate on each ballot, reported majorities above 99 per cent and called them consent. Indian law has a quieter version. Under Section 53(2) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, if the number of candidates equals the number of seats, the returning officer declares them elected without a poll. In April 2024 this happened in Surat: the nomination of the main rival candidate was rejected, the others withdrew, and a Lok Sabha member was declared elected before a single vote was cast. The Supreme Court gave voters a NOTA button in PUCL v. Union of India (2013), but where no poll is held there is no button to press. In Angar, in Solapur district, no panchayat election was held for sixty years, and its first nagar panchayat president was elected unopposed amid allegations of threats, which her family denies. A contest is the mechanism that turns silence into choice. Without it we do not know what the silence means.

The most complete silence is that of the detained. Preventive detention, permitted by Article 22, holds a person not for what he has done but for what the executive fears he may do, and he cannot object before the order is made. During the Emergency, the Supreme Court held in ADM Jabalpur (1976) that while the right to move the courts under Article 21 was suspended, no detenu could seek habeas corpus. Justice H.R. Khanna dissented alone: without the sanctity of life and liberty, he wrote, “the distinction between a lawless society and one governed by laws would cease to have any meaning.” Outside, the streets were quiet, and Vinoba Bhave called the period an “Anushasan Parva”, a festival of discipline. It took until Puttaswamy (2017) for nine judges to say that ADM Jabalpur was wrong. This week the Supreme Court quashed a detention under the National Security Act in Sambhal that rested on a confession made in police custody, and ordered Uttar Pradesh to pay ₹10 lakh. A confession extracted in custody is the purest case of silence dressed up as consent: the words are there, but the freedom that would give them meaning is not.

A people can also be silenced across time. In his Minute on Education of 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Indian learning was silent to him only because he could not read it. George Orwell saw the danger that follows: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Every textbook is a selection. NCERT’s new Class 9 book drops the chapters on the French and Russian revolutions and presents 1000–1700 CE as a period of “Resistance and Resilience”. Supporters say the old syllabus gave Europe more pages than the Ahoms; critics say composite culture has receded. The point here is not which selection is right, but that a fourteen-year-old cannot dissent from a past she was never shown. In Japan, the historian Ienaga Saburo fought lawsuits against the State’s screening of his textbook from 1965 to 1997. A curriculum earns consent only when historians, States and teachers can contest it in the open.

The land itself cannot object, and so it is most easily misread. India’s administrative records have long classed open grasslands as “wastelands”, though grasslands store about a third of the Earth’s land carbon. A new study in PNAS finds that ancient grasslands, once destroyed, do not recover their old character for at least a century. The pastoralists who grazed them were never asked. When consent is actually sought, the answer can surprise. In 2013 the Supreme Court let the gram sabhas of the Dongria Kondh decide whether bauxite should be mined in the Niyamgiri hills, and all twelve said no. That is why the dispute now before the courts over gram sabha consent for the Great Nicobar project matters: a signature on a resolution is not consent unless those who signed knew what they gave up and were free to refuse.

The counter-position deserves a fair hearing. The old legal maxim says qui tacet consentire videtur, he who is silent is taken to agree. John Locke argued in his Second Treatise (1689) that anyone who enjoys the protection of a government gives it tacit consent. No State can consult every citizen on everything, and an unopposed candidate may simply be popular. Model villages such as Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar value unanimity because it spares them factional feuds. All this is true, but it proves less than it seems. Locke’s tacit consent assumed that a person was free to leave. Albert Hirschman, in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), showed that silence can be loyalty, but only where exit and voice are real options; where both are closed, silence is neither. Unanimity is valuable when it is chosen, and the proof that it was chosen is that a contest remained possible. In 2021 opposition panels did contest in Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar. That is the sign of a healthy consensus: it could have been broken.

The remedy is to make dissent cheap and visible. Scrutinise mass withdrawals in uncontested elections as closely as a disputed count. Make advisory boards in detention cases hear the detenu in substance, not in form. Revise textbooks in open consultation. Count grasslands as ecosystems, and treat the Forest Rights Act’s gram sabha consent as a question actually asked, not a form to be filled. The test for Perid is not whether it votes, but whether it could, and whether the woman in the reserved seat could speak without paying for it. Rome called a solitude peace. A democracy must refuse that confusion. It should treat silence as a question still to be answered, and give people the freedom to answer it.