By Krishna Jha
BJP Government is facing crisis of legitimacy. Over a decade of governance failures, official denials, organized loots, attacks on institutions and subversion of democracy and many other such, the party has been facing an identity crisis. Added to all this is the conduct of the Election Commission of India, that has triggered mass protests all over the country.
A moment has come when people are engulfed by massive political resentment. The forces that were diverse earlier and fighting for separate aims, are now one and rebelling for the same cause, and that is against the establishment. The movement is not without popular participation and mobilization. It is also imperative that the public opinion must be consolidated as the masses have come to realize their own strength. Added to it, there should also be transparency, for both sides. It is true that ECI is constitutional body, and our country has been known for maintaining the purity of people’s choice. It is their representative elected to lead the state apparatus, thus to protect the confidence of people. But there has been loss of faith among people.
The issue is not only about Special Intensive Revision (SIR), there has been questions about lack of regularities, about electoral rolls, and even the polling data. The credibility of all these have been in question. Those who lost their voting rights, were huge in number, for example, 17 lakh in Bihar and 91 lakh in Bengal. These are all just arbitrary deletion. Such a crisis has never been in the country. The basic essentials are missing. Official denials, attacks on institutions and thus subversion of democracy has left the ruling BJP without its legitimacy. There is almost no transparency.
According to reports brought to light by Indian Express, the two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had placed 14 questions objecting on several issues about the functioning of the ECI. Decisions and instruction were brought without letting them know. Such steps were taken in the context of deletion and restoration of names and changes in ‘voters’ registration as well as in electoral data base. The ECI did not object to such charges but observed that more often its decisions were unanimous. At the root of the present crisis is the nationwide SIR, an exercise in which the ECI examines electoral rolls again and requires voters whose entries are flagged to establish their eligibility to remain on the rolls. SIR has removed more than 13 crore names from draft voter rolls across 30 States and Union Territories. There is little optimism that most of those whose names are removed from the list of voters would ever be able to make it again. Some names will be restored, but the majority may remain excluded through no fault of the voters.
If allowed to continue, the consequences of the SIR exercise and the way the ECI is functioning will destroy the fundamentals of electoral democracy in India. Even the way the election commissioners are appointed has put a big question mark on the election system in India. The three member selection committee that opted for election commissioners is dominated by the Prime Minister and a Union Cabinet Minister. This points to a disturbing possibility of collusion between the ruling party and an institution that should be independent of it. As a matter of principle, there should be a firm distance between the Executive and the ECI. Instead, the composition of the committee is such that the two members of the Executive are bound to rule over the lone third member, the Leader of Opposition. No wonder, the ECI’s actions and the BJP’s public defence of the Election Commissioners make any possible firewall appear non-existent.
In fact, the dispute over electoral integrity predates the SIR, although the SIR has brought it to a new scale. The allegations of irregularities in electoral rolls, polling data and the functioning of the Election Commission were being raised by the opposition parties even before the SIR exercise was launched in Bihar in June 2025. They alleged arbitrary deletions, questionable additions of voters, and anomalies in reported turnouts: all of which they described as “vote chori” or vote theft. Instead of addressing the opposition parties’ concerns, the ECI rejected them and maintained that all was well and that changes to the rolls followed established procedures. As a constitutional body, the ECI is not only entrusted with conducting elections but also with protecting their integrity.
The crisis within the ECI is a manifestation of a wider crisis of legitimacy. It has shown how deeply citizens’ faith has been shaken in the country’s electoral process, its voter rolls, and, to a great extent, the outcomes of recent elections.
As the election system faces the deepest credibility crisis in its history, people from all walks of life, mostly youth, have come out in protest. The nature of the protest and its massive reach shows that the BJP government has completely lost the trust of India’s citizens. Such a crisis arises when the government fails on every front.
Calls for the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation reflect the depth of that distrust. A resignation in itself would not repair the damage. India needs an independent accounting of the disputed decisions, a transparent review of the voter rolls, immediate re-enrolment of people wrongly excluded, and compensation for the needless hardship they have suffered. And if the investigations establish that the wrongful exclusions of voters affected an election’s outcome, there should not be any alternative to the ECI but to nullify that election and hold a fresh one. (IPA Service)
