I am not sentimental about institutions. Election commissions, courts, police forces and parliaments earn trust through conduct; they do not inherit a lifetime supply at inauguration. So when opposition parties identify missing electors, duplicate entries or implausible addresses, those cases should be investigated quickly and publicly. A citizen wrongly excluded from a roll has suffered a democratic injury, not a clerical inconvenience.
What exhausts me is the INDIA alliance’s jump from individual errors to an all-purpose national conspiracy before doing the evidentiary work in between. Electoral rolls are enormous, living administrative documents. People die, migrate, marry, rent rooms, change constituencies and register twice. The Election Commission’s own voter-services portal exists for searches, corrections and applications, while its statistical reports provide the kind of election-level material from which serious challenges can begin. None of this proves the system is flawless. It does mean that a viral slide deck is not a substitute for a reproducible audit.
Suspicion is not yet a method
The opposition’s preferred communications sequence is now familiar. Announce an explosive conclusion, display a handful of suspicious records, demand that institutions disprove an undefined nationwide plot, and accuse anyone requesting the underlying dataset of evasion. Television panels then spend two days debating the adjective rather than the evidence. By the time a technical explanation arrives, the caravan has moved to the next allegation.
I understand the political incentive. Congress cannot easily admit that the BJP’s booth machinery remains better organised across many states. It is more comforting to suggest that lists themselves explain every defeat. But booth-level organisation is not mystical. Parties appoint agents, inspect draft rolls, file objections, contact households and track applications. This is tedious work performed months before cameras arrive. The BJP has invested in it relentlessly. The Congress too often discovers procedural urgency after results disappoint it.
There is also an unpleasant asymmetry in the rhetoric. When opposition parties win, the electorate has courageously defended democracy. When they lose, the machinery becomes suspect. Institutions can certainly behave differently across cases, but a theory that changes with the winner is not an institutional critique; it is emotional insurance.
The commission should answer better
Defending the need for evidence does not require defending every communication choice by the Election Commission. The commission has sometimes responded to political charges with lawyerly fragments, delayed briefings or an aggrieved tone. That is counterproductive. An authority managing elections in a polarised country must over-explain its process. It should publish machine-readable change logs showing additions, deletions and corrections by constituency, with privacy-protecting aggregation and reason codes.
Draft-roll periods should be accompanied by simple public dashboards. How many names were proposed for deletion because of death, relocation, duplication or non-verification? How many notices were served? How many decisions were reversed after objections? Which polling parts were statistical outliers? Those questions can be answered without revealing an elector’s sensitive information. Transparency would help citizens and deprive political actors of the fog in which extravagant claims thrive.
The commission should also make grievance outcomes easier to track. A voter who submits a correction should see what evidence was considered and why an application succeeded or failed. Political parties should receive structured data through a common protocol rather than informal access that fuels suspicions of unequal treatment. Trust grows when procedures are observable.
Congress must decide whether it wants proof or atmosphere
A responsible opposition would create a permanent electoral-roll unit staffed with data analysts, lawyers and experienced booth workers. It would publish anonymised records, define its tests for suspicious patterns and invite independent replication. It would distinguish duplicates from legitimate same-name voters and demographic change from administrative manipulation. Most importantly, it would pursue remedies during revision, not preserve every complaint for a post-defeat press conference.
Instead, much of the current style aims to create atmosphere: democracy is ending, every discrepancy is centrally commanded and procedural disagreement proves complicity. That language may energise loyalists, but it makes correction harder. Officials become defensive, genuine errors get buried in partisan noise and citizens are encouraged to distrust the only process through which governments can peacefully change.
The BJP should not become complacent merely because Congress overstates its case. Ruling parties benefit from institutional legitimacy too, and they should welcome auditable rolls rather than treat every question as sabotage. Local BJP units should cooperate with corrections even where deletions may alter electoral advantage. Winning an election is valuable; winning one whose basic records withstand scrutiny is more valuable.
I would defend any opposition voter wrongly removed from a roll, and I would criticise any official who ignored credible evidence. But I will not pretend that the existence of errors proves the opposition’s largest allegation. India’s electoral rolls need continuous cleaning, transparent statistics and accessible appeals. They also need political parties willing to do the work. Manufactured outrage is cheaper than booth-level verification, which is precisely why Lutyens commentary finds it more exciting. Democracy, inconveniently, depends on the boring part.
