This is a fraught moment for the Election Commission. The poll monitor, which has consistently ranked high on the list of India’s most trusted institutions, has been at the centre of a storm, or two. One, the accusations of “vote chori” leveled at it by the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, earlier in Maharashtra, and more recently in Karnataka. Those allegations evidently stem from a political call taken by the Congress leader to make the “stolen election” the centrepiece of his party’s campaign – its first test will be in the upcoming election in Bihar, where he has just begun a 16-day, 1300-km “Vote Adhikar Yatra”. And two, the controversy over the EC’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, also in Bihar, which has sparked genuine fears of widespread disenfranchisement because of the way it is being conducted. In a break from the past, the SIR shifts the burden of proof on to the voters and it seems to be more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. It is against this backdrop that the Commission held a press conference on Sunday, in a bid to answer questions and clear the air. It addressed some questions, ducked and, stonewalled, others. By assuming a politically adversarial tone and giving the impression of being thin-skinned — the EC has a lesson or two to learn on dealing with criticism from the Supreme Court — it also notched some own goals.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar pointed out, rightly, to the established due process for making complaints about fraudulent voters and lists, and the fact that the poll monitor must necessarily take into account considerations such as voter privacy as it moves towards greater transparency. It is also evident that the Congress’s allegations of “vote chori”, by a grand conspiracy involving collusion between the poll monitor and ruling BJP, that cuts through a layered electoral process’s several checks and balances, depends on a political suspension of disbelief. At the same time, however, as an ongoing series of reports in this paper has shown, the SIR in Bihar has raised legitimate questions about timing and design that must be addressed urgently. The Supreme Court has also intervened on SIR, upholding the EC’s power to carry out the exercise while nudging it to display more transparency. That the EC has published the list of 65 lakh names deleted from the draft rolls in the first phase of SIR, giving reasons for the deletions, is a step in the right direction. That electoral officers in all of Bihar’s 38 districts have been reportedly asked to consider the family tree as an informal 12th document — amid a scramble by voters for the relatively hard to get 11 documents on the EC’s list — is heartening.
Questions and controversies about who is a voter and who isn’t are set to become more salient amid an inward-looking politics, a waning of common ground and when distrust of mediating institutions is rising. In times such as these the EC must recognise what is at stake, and why it is crucial for it to be fair and independent and be seen to be so too. The press conference was a beginning. The EC must take the process forward, with a sense of responsibility and, more importantly, with humility. And a conviction that it is a constitutional authority that needs to address every question, not have its members sound like the government officials they once were.
