There are few more reliable rituals in Delhi than an opposition press conference declaring democracy dead before lunch and returning to television studios by dinner. Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls supplied the INDIA alliance with months of this theatre. Every form became disenfranchisement, every deadline became a plot and every Election Commission clarification became further evidence that clarification itself was suspicious. The underlying subject was serious. The performance around it frequently was not.
I do not believe the Election Commission should be immune from scrutiny. Electoral rolls determine who can exercise the most basic political right, and an eligible citizen wrongly excluded suffers a harm that cannot be repaired by a statistic about overall coverage. The Indian Express account of how the process changed records legitimate early fears and subsequent adjustments. But the Commission’s published bulletin on claims and objections also demonstrates why sweeping allegations should be tested against the formal remedies parties actually used.
A clean roll is not an authoritarian concept
People die, move home and register more than once. Young citizens become eligible. Women change residences after marriage. Migrant workers live between two places. India’s electoral database is therefore not a sacred tablet requiring reverent preservation; it is an administrative record requiring continual maintenance. Anyone who has tried correcting a name on a public document knows how easily errors persist. The answer cannot be to stop verification because verification may make mistakes. It must be to design verification so mistakes are visible, appealable and corrected before polling.
The opposition’s rhetoric often begins from the premise that removing any name is presumptively malicious. That is untenable. A deceased voter’s name should be removed. A duplicate registration should be resolved. A person permanently settled elsewhere must vote from the correct constituency. Inflated or stale rolls do not protect democracy; they weaken confidence in it. The right argument concerns evidence, notice and due process, not whether rolls should ever be revised.
I understand why Bihar produced anxiety. Documentation is uneven, especially among poorer citizens, older women and people whose births were never formally recorded. An exercise conducted near an election naturally raises questions about timing. The Commission initially communicated in the language of forms and categories when it needed to explain, repeatedly and locally, how no eligible voter would be abandoned for lacking a fashionable folder of papers. Bureaucracies underestimate the terror created by a missing certificate because bureaucrats spend their days surrounded by certificates.
That was a government-side failure worth stating plainly. The BJP’s defenders sometimes responded to every concern as if acknowledging administrative risk would validate the wildest Congress accusation. It would not. A confident government can say that roll integrity matters and that documentation rules must accommodate Indian realities. In fact, insisting on both strengthens the case for revision. Citizenship and voting eligibility are legal questions; they cannot depend on whether a villager preserved the document a Delhi official finds most convenient.
Claims must eventually meet forms
Where my patience ends is at the gap between televised numbers and submitted objections. Political parties possess booth-level organisations precisely so they can identify eligible voters, help with claims and challenge dubious deletions. If a party tells the country that millions are being deliberately excluded, I expect its booth agents to produce names, constituencies and filings. A rally is not an appeal mechanism. A hashtag cannot restore a voter to a roll. The less glamorous work of democracy happens at a desk with evidence.
This is why the public record matters. The Commission said draft-roll deletions required a speaking order, inquiry and reasonable opportunity. Those safeguards should be audited, not waved away. If an order was issued without notice, expose it. If a booth officer rejected acceptable evidence, publish the case and pursue the appeal. If lists were inaccessible, demand machine-readable publication. Specificity protects citizens. Grand claims without casework mainly protect politicians from being proved wrong.
Congress has developed a damaging habit of treating institutional disagreement as institutional capture. It distrusts the Election Commission when it loses, electronic voting machines when outcomes disappoint and investigating agencies when allies face questions. Institutions deserve criticism, but permanent insinuation is not reform. It teaches supporters that no adverse outcome can be legitimate and frees party organisations from examining their own weakness. Rahul Gandhi can attract cameras to a march; the harder task is ensuring that party workers know every household in a booth.
The INDIA alliance’s regional parties understand ground organisation better, which makes their participation in this national melodrama particularly cynical. They know rolls contain errors. They know revisions are routine administrative necessities. They also know that a frightened voter is politically useful. By presenting verification as a covert citizenship test before the evidence justified that conclusion, they converted reasonable vigilance into maximal panic. Once every procedural request is called disenfranchisement, language loses the ability to distinguish a correctable error from an actual assault on voting rights.
Transparency is the cure, not paralysis
The Election Commission should nevertheless learn from the controversy. It should publish deletion lists by booth with legally permissible reasons, offer searchable tools in local languages and create a simple receipt trail for every claim. Notices should reach citizens through more than one channel. Political parties should receive structured data early enough to inspect it, while privacy protections prevent bulk misuse. Independent observers and courts must be able to reconstruct what happened to a disputed name. Trust is not demanded; it is engineered through verifiable procedure.
Deadlines must also account for migration and gender. A woman who moved after marriage should not be trapped between an old address and a new one. A seasonal worker should not discover exclusion only after returning to vote. Door-to-door verification needs repeat visits and community assistance, not a single encounter treated as divine proof of absence. The Commission has immense field capacity. It should use that capacity to include eligible voters as aggressively as it removes ineligible entries.
I would also make political parties disclose their own performance. How many booth-level agents did each party appoint? How many draft entries did they examine? How many claims and objections did they submit within the prescribed window? How many succeeded on appeal? Such data would transform debate. It might also explain why some leaders prefer microphones: a microphone does not reveal an empty organisational chart.
The courts have an essential role, but litigation should refine procedure rather than replace administration. Judges can test whether document demands are lawful, whether adequate time was given and whether the burden unfairly falls on citizens. They cannot verify every household from the bench. A sensible democratic system combines Commission fieldwork, party scrutiny, public data and judicial review. The opposition’s story of one captured machine confronting helpless citizens erases the many safeguards it should be using.
Democracy deserves less melodrama
The BJP should resist triumphalism. A revised roll is not automatically accurate because the Commission completed it, and a favourable election result would not retroactively prove every deletion correct. Party workers should help citizens file claims regardless of presumed political preference. If the government side appears indifferent to exclusions because it expects electoral advantage, it will deserve the distrust it receives. Legitimacy matters more than tactical cleverness.
But the opposition must abandon its own convenient presumption: that poor voters belong to it and any verification therefore targets them. That idea is patronising as well as politically outdated. Welfare delivery, mobility and changing aspirations have scrambled old voting blocs. An eligible citizen is not Congress property whose documentation becomes democratic only when a party spokesperson invokes it. The state owes that citizen inclusion because she is a citizen, not because any alliance imagines her vote.
What Bihar taught me is that India needs both cleaner rolls and kinder administration. Those goals are not enemies. A serious opposition would demand transparent lists, workable documents, generous correction windows and accountable officers. A serious government would accept those safeguards while defending revision. Instead, much of Delhi offered us the usual morality play: saints, villains and democracy’s funeral announced hourly.
I decline the invitation. Electoral integrity is tedious, local and evidentiary. It involves checking names, serving notices, correcting spellings and hearing appeals. That work lacks the emotional satisfaction of accusing the BJP of ending the republic, but it is how voting rights are actually protected. The INDIA alliance may continue manufacturing outrage for an audience trained to applaud it. I would rather count the filed objections. Democracy, unlike a television panel, eventually requires receipts.
