I have no objection to opposition parties watching the Election Commission with the alertness of a hawk above a field. That is part of their job, and Indian institutions are not porcelain idols that must be protected from questions. My objection begins when scrutiny is replaced by a demand that the referee be sacked because one team has decided, before presenting a convincing case, that the match is fixed.
That is where the Congress campaign against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has arrived. AICC general secretary K. C. Venugopal said the agitation would continue until the CEC was removed, according to PTI reporting carried by The Indian Express. Removal is no longer the conclusion of a documented argument; it is the opening demand. The alleged wrong and the desired punishment have changed places.
I find this revealing because Congress has spent years telling us that institutions are being weakened, yet its preferred method of strengthening this one is apparently to threaten its leadership with a nationwide agitation. An institution does not become independent merely when it produces outcomes convenient to the opposition. Nor does criticism become democratic simply because the critic uses the vocabulary of constitutional morality.
A serious allegation requires serious paperwork
The controversy concerns electoral-roll revision and the risk that legitimate voters, especially poorer citizens, could be deleted. That risk should never be treated casually. India’s rolls contain errors; citizens migrate, die, marry, change addresses and discover that the state’s databases do not speak to one another as fluently as ministerial presentations suggest. Anyone who has tried to correct an address knows the republic still has a taste for photocopies.
But that is precisely why the response must be granular. Which constituency? Which polling part? How many names? What category of deletion? Were notices issued? How many objections were restored after review? The Election Commission’s voter-services portal provides facilities for checking registration and filing applications, while parties have booth-level agents who can inspect rolls and raise objections. These mechanisms may be imperfect, but an opposition claiming mass disenfranchisement should use the resulting records to build a case that can survive beyond a rally stage.
I would take Congress more seriously if it published constituency-level deletion lists, documented patterns, named the procedural instruction allegedly violated and financed legal help for affected voters. Instead, its national rhetoric races ahead of its evidence. “Save the vote” is an effective slogan because nobody wishes to be seen opposing it. It is less effective as an audit methodology.
The distinction matters. Electoral-roll disputes are not resolved by asking whether one trusts the BJP or Congress in the abstract. They are resolved by establishing whether a particular citizen was eligible, whether due process preceded deletion and whether an appeal was available. A party that jumps over these questions is not defending institutional procedure. It is creating a political presumption under which any administrative defect becomes proof of conspiracy.
Congress has discovered an all-purpose explanation for defeat
I understand why the party finds this strategy attractive. Rebuilding a political organisation is exhausting. It requires selecting credible local leaders, resolving factional feuds, developing policy that extends beyond entitlement auctions and persuading voters who do not read English-language editorials. Declaring the umpire compromised is much quicker. It turns organisational weakness into moral victimhood.
Congress-era nostalgia makes this worse. Some commentators write as if institutions were perfectly independent until May 2014, when history suddenly acquired shadows. Indians old enough to remember the Emergency, the misuse of Article 356 and decades of politicised administration are entitled to laugh. The lesson is not that present institutions should escape scrutiny. It is that Congress has no hereditary title to certify institutional virtue.
The party’s supporters will say the scale of the alleged problem justifies forceful language. I would answer that scale increases the burden of proof; it does not erase it. If lakhs of voters are threatened, produce the strongest public dataset in Indian political history. Put searchable records online, protect personal information, invite independent statisticians and litigate specific violations. A party capable of organising a national protest is capable of maintaining a competent evidence desk.
There is also a dangerous incentive here. If every loss can be attributed to compromised machinery, political parties cease learning from voters. Candidates need not ask why women preferred one welfare architecture, why a caste coalition moved, why urban voters punished municipal disorder or why a campaign failed to inspire. The comforting answer is ready: the system did it. Democracy becomes a conspiracy theory with polling booths.
The government should not become complacent
A pro-government view need not be a blank cheque. The Union government and the Election Commission should understand that procedural opacity feeds the opposition’s most dramatic claims. Revision schedules, grounds for deletion, notice procedures and appeal outcomes should be published in formats ordinary citizens and researchers can actually use. A scanned PDF containing several thousand rows is technically disclosure and practically camouflage.
The Commission should also communicate with less institutional hauteur. When citizens fear losing the vote, telling them that rules were followed is not enough. Show the rule, the notice and the remedy. Publish restoration rates. Explain discrepancies in plain language. Independence is strengthened by demonstrable competence, not prickliness.
The BJP, meanwhile, should resist the temptation to answer every complaint with partisan mockery. It has the larger organisation and therefore the greater ability to assist voters. Help citizens check their names irrespective of preference. A governing party confident in its support should want accurate rolls, not merely defensible ones. If local BJP workers find erroneous deletions, they should raise them rather than assume that every administrative action is sacred.
These concessions do not validate Congress’s demand for the CEC’s head. They establish a more credible standard: identify the wrong, demonstrate its extent, exhaust correction mechanisms and then argue for accountability proportional to the evidence. Removal cannot sensibly be the price of political disagreement.
Institutional trust is earned in both directions
We often hear that public trust in institutions is declining. True, but trust is not solely the institution’s responsibility. Political leaders also shape it. When they allege capture without publishing adequate evidence, they teach supporters that democratic outcomes are legitimate only when favourable. That lesson is difficult to contain once released.
I am not asking Congress to be polite. Opposition parties should be noisy, suspicious and occasionally infuriating. I am asking it to be specific. A dossier is more democratic than a slogan because it gives the accused institution something to answer and the public something to judge. Anger without particulars merely asks citizens to choose their preferred tribe.
The irony is that Congress could perform a valuable service here. India needs sustained, professional scrutiny of electoral rolls. It needs parties to invest in booth-level organisation between elections, not parachute into disputes after revision has begun. It needs lawyers and volunteers who can help a migrant worker restore a name before polling day. Those tasks lack the glamour of demanding a resignation, but they are how voting rights are actually protected.
My view is therefore unfashionably procedural. Investigate every credible deletion. Correct every wrongful exclusion. Publish more data than the law minimally requires. But do not allow a political party to convert its suspicions into a veto over the constitutional machinery. Congress is entitled to challenge the referee. It is not entitled to remove him merely by shouting from the stands.
If the party possesses evidence worthy of its rhetoric, it should place it before the country. Until then, its campaign looks less like a defence of democracy than an attempt to pre-empt democracy’s verdict. I give voters more credit than that, and I suspect the voters give themselves more credit too.
