Opinion Vandita Mishra writes on Bihar SIR and ‘vote chori’: The EC’s response raises more questions

That the EC sought to address questions swirling around it, when its conduct of the Bihar exercise has raised serious apprehensions of large-scale disenfranchisement, was reassuring. But its tone and tenor raised more questions.

Over nearly an hour and a half, the CEC’s main message was: The EC stands with “the people” and does not discriminate between parties; in a multi-layered electoral process, the onus is on those who raise objections about fake voters and compromised voter lists to follow the rulebook, abide by its procedures and timelines; if they do not do so, they must either make a declaration on oath or apologise.

There was something off-key about what the EC said and its many silences. To begin with, a constitutional body was insistently proclaiming its oneness with “the people” while refusing to acknowledge the people’s representative — the EC could have respectfully acknowledged the Leader of Opposition even as it disagreed with him. Its refusal to take Rahul Gandhi’s name while addressing his allegations, seemed churlish.

More importantly, if it wanted to paint itself above the political fray, and as an institution that is procedurally even-handed, it should have addressed the fact that it has also been put in the dock by the government, not just the LoP.

Rahul Gandhi cast the first stone with his allegations of manipulation of electoral rolls/turnout figures in Maharashtra and then with his charges of defective electoral rolls in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura constituency. But subsequently, the ruling party, while taking aim at Rahul Gandhi, has also (unintendedly) targeted the EC.

Listen in to another press conference on Wednesday, a few days before the EC’s meet-the-press on Sunday, and you will hear BJP’s Anurag Thakur essentially repeating all of Rahul Gandhi’s allegations — with a communal tinge.

Like Gandhi, Thakur alleged the presence of fake voters, duplication of names, mass additions, doubtful addresses and dubious first-time voters in voter lists, and the misuse of government machinery to engineer these discrepancies. The difference was that Thakur picked constituencies won by Opposition leaders to make his case — Wayanad, Diamond Harbour, Kannauj, Rae Bareli, Mainpuri and Kolathur assembly — and that he repeatedly drew attention to the names of the so-called doubtful voters, all Muslim.

In Thakur’s list: Mohammad Kaif Khan, whose name is allegedly registered in three polling booths in Rae Bareli; Khurshid Alam, whose father’s name allegedly keeps changing in Diamond Harbour; Rafiullah in Kolathur with allegedly three voter ids, Mahmoona in Wayanad, Sabri Begum, Shah Mohammad, Mohammad Shahbaz, Nisar Bano in Kannauj … The list went on and Thakur’s chilling recitation left no one in doubt that what was remarkable was the religion of the allegedly fraudulent voter in the lists. Thakur connected the dots from the “farji vote” to the Congress/Opposition’s “appeasement politics”, which, he said, patronises infiltrators or the “ghuspaithiya vote bank”, amid “Islamic radicalisation” and other threats posed by “ek varg” (one section) to “national security”.

If in Maharashtra and Karnataka, Rahul Gandhi made a political leap from pointing out purported discrepancies/inconsistencies in the electoral rolls/turnout figures to claiming that the election result was manipulated by the BJP, Thakur was making a long leap of his own – on the back of a communal dog-whistle politics.

What was common in the telling of both Thakur and Gandhi, however, was the incrimination of the EC. After all, it is the poll monitor on whose watch the election was conducted — in Mahadevapura or Wayanad, Diamond Harbour or Rae Bareli, whether it was the Opposition that won or the BJP.

The EC did not show any awareness in Sunday’s press conference of its predicament — under attack from both Opposition and government. It did not seem to recognise that it cannot just challenge Rahul Gandhi to sign an affidavit, take an oath, and leave it at that.

More fundamentally, the EC’s belligerent refrain — show me the evidence, in the proper format, by a certain date, or else — shifts the onus of cleaning up the electoral rolls from itself to the people and political parties. Just as the Commission shifted the responsibility of proving their innocence, or their citizenship, on to voters in the SIR in Bihar, it is now saying that if anyone raises concerns about its conduct, it is they who must explain themselves, not the EC.

This has disquieting implications in a grim moment for India’s democracy.

It is a time when wide allegations of “vote chori” by the leader of the main Opposition party threaten to drown out the genuine and specific concerns about disenfranchisement sparked by the EC’s Bihar exercise. Rahul Gandhi’s barrage of accusations have also raised a sombre question: Having raised the pitch so high, where does Congress, and the Opposition, go from here? How do they step back from a spiral into nihilistic politics?

And if they don’t turn back from the edge, what happens to the peaceful transition of power India has prided itself on, which the people have taken for granted? Does it pose a new challenge for the conduct of elections, their legitimacy?

What happens if the Bihar election delivers a close result, what if it has narrow margins?

It is a grim moment, also, because of the Modi government’s response — first its attempt to speak for the EC, instead of letting it speak for itself, adding to the doubts regarding the poll monitor’s independence. And then its subsequent misfiring at Rahul that has only ended up wounding the EC.

This is a sobering moment, most of all, because the EC, the constitutional authority with a hard-won autonomy, seems not to recognise the full scale of its own and the polity’s crisis. Urgent repair work is needed by a credible and impartial umpire. There must be cross-party conversations on voters’ lists, a recommitment to shared protocols, with a focus on voter inclusion, not exclusion, if a free fall into a political dead-end is to be avoided.

For a nation that celebrated its 79th I-Day last week, that’s the challenge. So far, the EC is not stepping up to it.

Till next week,
Vandita