For more than seven decades, India’s elections have been the envy of the democratic world: regular, competitive contests that transfer power peacefully even as many neighbors and postcolonial peers have stumbled. Conventional wisdom holds that India’s democratic shortfalls — the erosion of institutional checks, curbs on dissent, rising majoritarianism — are most visible in the long stretches between elections. When the electoral spotlight is on, India seems to shine: high turnout, raucous multi-party competition, and an electorate that can still surprise.
However, doubts about the integrity of India’s elections have grown sharper in recent years. The recent uproar over electoral rolls — from the Congress Party’s exposé of voter lists in a Bengaluru constituency to the contentious Special Intensive Revision in poll-bound Bihar — underscores that the foundations of electoral integrity can no longer be taken for granted. But the challenges do not stop there.
The politicization of institutions, skewed rules of political finance, and the weaponization of investigative agencies are also reshaping the playing field in significant ways. Quite simply, the line between “democracy between elections” and “democracy during elections” is a chimera. Weaknesses that emerge between elections do not vanish when campaign season begins.
The ECI: Referee or Spectator?
The Election Commission of India (ECI) is one of the world’s most powerful election management bodies, vested with supreme constitutional authority to run state and national polls. Its reputation rests on its ability to manage elections across India’s vast and complex electorate and was further burnished by reformist chief election commissioners like T.N. Seshan in the 1990s, who cracked down on malpractice. But like many “fourth branch” institutions, its independence has tended to wane under prolonged one-party dominance.
One emerging flashpoint is the timing and phasing of elections. The Model Code of Conduct (MCC) — the ECI’s primary tool for ensuring a level playing field — takes effect the moment polls are announced, barring governments from unveiling new schemes to woo voters. In recent cycles, the ECI has been accused of timing announcements and structuring multi-phase polls in ways that gave incumbents extra time and opportunity to campaign aggressively in target states.
Selective enforcement of the MCC is another concern. In 2019, complaints against top leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for inflammatory speech were dismissed by the ECI, with the lone dissenting commissioner sidelined, investigated, and ultimately transferred. In 2024, after the prime minister made highly charged, communally-tinged remarks in Rajasthan, the ECI demurred, issuing bland reminders to the BJP and Congress presidents instead of targeted censure.
A politicized appointments process has further deepened mistrust. Last year, the Supreme Court tried to insulate the ECI by mandating that commissioners be chosen by a three-person panel of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, and the chief justice of India. Parliament swiftly revised this safeguard and replaced the chief justice with a union cabinet minister. The abrupt comings and goings of commissioners — under murky circumstances — and recent changes to their service conditions have only reinforced perceptions of executive dominance.
Even the ECI’s once-sterling reputation for transparency has been tarnished. In 2024, it delayed releasing final voter turnout figures and withheld constituency-level vote counts without adequate explanation. Its puzzling reluctance to publish polling-station data in the general election, and its more recent obfuscation in the Bihar SIR process, have fueled doubts about its commitment to open, timely disclosure.
Taken together, these controversies have left the ECI looking defensive, timid, and selective — a dangerous posture for an institution meant to serve as an impartial referee to the world’s largest democracy.
Opaque Political Finance
If the Election Commission is the referee, the rules of political finance define the size and shape of the playing field. In recent years, those rules have been rewritten in ways that sharply tilt the field.
The most consequential shift came in 2018 with the introduction of electoral bonds, bearer instruments sold by the State Bank of India that allowed companies and individuals to donate anonymously to political parties.
Just months before the 2024 polls, the Supreme Court struck down the scheme, ordering the disclosure of all bond transactions. But the scheme’s opacity, coupled with the Court’s delayed verdict, ensured that the ruling party enjoyed a years-long windfall. Between 2017-2018 and 2022-2023, the BJP secured 55 percent of all bonds by value — more than triple the Congress’s share. The newly disclosed data told its own story: loss-making companies donating millions; dozens of new firms contributing heavily within months of incorporation; and companies facing tax or enforcement probes giving generously.
Bonds, however, were only part of the problem. Parliament also eliminated the cap on corporate donations, abolished the requirement that companies disclose political contributions in their annual accounts, loosened rules to permit greater foreign corporate giving, and retained a high disclosure threshold for donations despite lowering the cash ceiling. Together, these changes made it even harder for voters to follow the money.
Misuse of Investigative Agencies
In India, the executive’s interference in ostensibly independent investigative agencies is nothing new — the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was once derisively dubbed the “Congress Bureau of Investigation.” In this regard, the ruling party has not had to invent new tools of coercion; it has simply perfected and intensified the use of existing ones.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the record of the Enforcement Directorate (ED). Between 2014 and September 2024, ED cases against politicians rose fourfold, according to the Indian Express. An extraordinary 95 percent targeted opposition leaders. However, convictions under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), the ED’s main weapon, remain vanishingly rare: government data show only 0.5 percent of accused have been convicted in the first 17 years since the law’s passage.
In the run-up to the 2024 elections, three episodes stood out: the arrest of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, and the freezing of the Congress Party’s bank accounts. Outsiders will inevitably struggle to assess the legal merits, but their selective timing during campaign season raises an unavoidable question: were these impartial law enforcement measures, or calculated political strikes intended to hobble the opposition?
Why Fairness Matters
The 2024 verdict proved that Indian voters can still confound political forecasts. But that should not distract from the deeper structural imbalances shaping elections long before polling day. Looking ahead, delimitation looms as a major concern. While much of the debate has focused on the inter-state redistribution of parliamentary seats after the next Census, recent redistricting exercises in Assam and Jammu and Kashmir offer worrying signs that constituency boundaries within states have been redrawn with political advantage in mind.
Restoring public confidence in India’s electoral processes will require fixing errors in the electoral rolls, but should not stop there. It demands a genuinely independent Election Commission insulated from executive influence, full transparency in political funding, and firm guardrails against the weaponization of investigative agencies.
The larger lesson is clear: if citizens come to believe elections are free but not fair, trust in democratic institutions will erode. Once lost, such trust is hard to regain.