The Election Commission of India (ECI) is at the receiving end of a barrage of charges questioning its credibility as an independent institution.
On August 8, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who is also the leader of the opposition in the lower house of India’s Parliament, alleged that the ECI was colluding with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to “steal seats and elections” in the country.
Accusing the ECI of “committing massive fraud” in the 2024 parliamentary elections, Gandhi said that over 100,250 “fake voters” were included in the electoral roll of one assembly segment, Mahadevapura, which falls under the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency.
Gandhi said that while such voter list fraud was reported from many places, they zeroed in on one constituency — Mahadevapura — to investigate and present a case study before the nation.
“We will prove — India’s prime minister has become prime minister by stealing [votes],” he said. The Congress party plans to “expose” similar voter list “frauds” in 48 parliamentary constituencies across the country in phases.
Modi returned to power for a third term in 2024, albeit with a weaker mandate.
Now, almost all of India’s opposition parties have joined hands to accuse the ECI of pro-government bias.
They are demanding a recall of the ECI’s controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in the poll-bound state of Bihar — an exercise slated to be replicated in other states, should the ECI have its way.
The SIR is currently under the Supreme Court’s scrutiny, though the top court has not stayed the exercise. On the ground, protests are gaining ground.
The poll panel’s response to the barrage of allegations leveled against it is remarkable.
Instead of facilitating scrutiny and answering charges, the ECI is focusing on hindering any examination of the electoral roll. It has used rather threatening language against opposition leaders and claimed that it is not legally obligated to furnish the information sought.
Political activist Yogendra Yadav said that any credible election commission would investigate the charges, fix the list, and punish the guilty. “Instead, it is threatening the Leader of the Opposition,” he wrote, adding, “The nation deserves an answer. And history will remember this.”
Yadav alleged that such voter list fraud happened in the western state of Maharashtra “quietly,” whereas the case of Bihar is “daylight robbery.”
Unusual or suspicious changes in the electoral roll were reported from Maharashtra in the aftermath of the November 2024 assembly election, which a BJP-led alliance swept, surprising many poll pundits.
Gandhi had demanded machine-readable digital voter rolls from the ECI at that time, too, but it was not entertained.
In June this year, Gandhi pointed out that in five months between the general elections in May-June 2024 and the Maharashtra assembly elections in November, the number of voters increased in the state by 410,000, whereas the figure for such additions in the last five years stood at only 310,000 voters.
After his recent detailed presentation on vote fraud in Mahadevapura, several media houses conducted independent enquiries on Gandhi’s allegations and found the charges to be true. Newsportal India Today’s ground check found 80 voters registered at a 10-15 sq ft house, whose current occupant denied any links to those listed in his address.
In Bihar, regarding the SIR, independent news portal Reporters’ Collective reported spotting over 5,000 “double and dubious voters” from the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh in the ECI’s recently-released draft roll of an assembly constituency in Bihar. The Newslaundry portal showed how a single house in Bihar was listed as having over 230 electors.
Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation, one of the key components of the opposition alliance in Bihar, highlighted, among other irregularities, how names of 180 voters in just one village had been removed from the list as “dead.”
Amid all these irregularities coming to the fore, the ECI’s response to various allegations itself has triggered suspicion about its intentions.
First, while the ECI said that their SIR exercise is not unprecedented and was done previously in 2003, orders and guidelines concerning the 2003 exercise have gone missing from the public domain, including the ECI website. The ECI told journalists that these documents could not be traced.
Second, after 6.5 million names were removed from Bihar’s draft electoral roll published on August 1, including 2.2 million as “declared dead,” political parties asked for a list of persons whose names were removed upon declaring them dead. While the ECI said that no name will be deleted without notice to the individual, it refused to furnish a separate list of the “dead.”
The poll panel told the Supreme Court that the law “does not require sharing details of persons not included in the draft electoral roll.” It added that the rules do not mandate it to furnish reasons for the non-inclusion of any individual in the draft roll. This resistance to disclosure makes it almost impossible for parties and people to verify whether the deletions are justified or if eligible voters have been disenfranchised.
Third, after opposition political parties and journalists started reporting wrong inclusions and deletions, the ECI, instead of addressing the faults, decided to hinder their search for irregularities by replacing machine-readable original PDFs with non-machine-readable, scanned copies, examination of which will not only take a longer time but also require use of premium software services.
Fourth, the ECI has decided to destroy CCTV footage and other visual records, including photographs and webcasts, in and outside polling stations 45 days after the election results, unless an election petition is filed within that period. Earlier, they used to be kept for at least three months. This has also come under heavy criticism, with democratic rights activists accusing it of being another step against transparency.
The ECI’s apparent lack of love for transparency is not surprising, though. The Modi government itself is known for blocking the flow of information using various means, including hastening the death of the RTI, a landmark legislation that was enacted by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2005. This law was a milestone toward transparency and accountability.
Writing for The Hindu, transparency activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri pointed out that the deletion of 6.5 million names from the electoral roll in Bihar after the first phase of the SIR amounted to an average deletion of about 27,000 voters per constituency. In a state where most seats are won by a slender margin, this number exceeds the winning margin in two-thirds of seats in the 2020 assembly elections.
“This scale of deletions could potentially swing the electoral outcome in most assembly constituencies,” they said, adding that such a lack of transparency has real and potentially grave implications for electoral democracy.
“Such disenfranchisement not only undermines the legitimacy of elections but also weakens faith in institutions that are meant to safeguard the democratic process,” they opined.
Krishangi Sinha and Sanjay Kumar of Lokniti-Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) highlighted that when Lokniti-CSDS conducted a post-poll survey of the National Election Study 2024, it revealed a “concerning trend” of 12 percent of the respondents saying they “don’t much” trust the ECI, and 7 percent saying they do not trust the poll body “at all.”
“At a time when public trust in institutions is under great strain, the ECI cannot afford to be so opaque and must take measures to ensure transparency,” they argued.
When people’s trust in institutions declines, it can trigger enormous unrest. India has to simply look east to Bangladesh for evidence. Irregularities in several successive elections triggered unrest that culminated in the toppling of the Awami League government there last year.