I understand why an intensive revision of electoral rolls makes people nervous. Voting is not a subscription service that can be restored after a chat with customer support. If an eligible citizen disappears from a roll because an official made a mistake, the injury is immediate and democratic. That is precisely why I want the Election Commission of India to publish comprehensible constituency-level numbers, explain unusual deletion patterns and make correction mechanisms genuinely usable. But I cannot follow the INDIA alliance from that sensible proposition to its favourite conclusion: that verification is inherently a BJP plot. That leap is not vigilance. It is campaign theatre performed before the paperwork has been read.
The timing of the opposition’s Delhi mobilisation makes the performance especially revealing. Public reporting described Congress and allied leaders preparing another rally against the Special Intensive Revision process, while the BJP attacked their choice of November 1 because it is also the anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh violence. The scheduling dispute was reported by The Tribune. I do not believe every calendar collision is a moral confession, but Congress cannot demand exquisite sensitivity from everybody else and then become mysteriously casual about a date embedded in its own history. Political memory cannot be activated only when it inconveniences the BJP.
Verification is not disenfranchisement by definition
The central fact routinely blurred in television arguments is that electoral rolls require maintenance. People die, move, acquire registration elsewhere, or remain duplicated because India is a mobile society administered through uneven local records. The Election Commission’s own revision portal sets out the architecture of draft publication, claims, objections and final publication. Its process may be imperfect, and citizens should test it aggressively, but it is not a secret mechanism invented in a party office last Tuesday. Revision is part of election administration.
Congress knows this. Its governments did not preside over magical electoral rolls that updated themselves without deletions, field verification or disputes. Yet its current rhetoric often suggests that the removal of any name proves partisan intent while the presence of duplicate or ineligible entries is somehow a harmless clerical curiosity. That is unserious. A clean roll protects the legitimate voter twice: it preserves that person’s inclusion and protects the value of the vote from administrative contamination. The proper standard is neither maximum deletion nor zero deletion. It is accurate inclusion with due process.
I am not asking citizens to trust an institution blindly. The Commission has sometimes communicated like a department writing to another department rather than a constitutional body addressing anxious voters. Dense press notes, aggregate numbers and combative responses create an information vacuum that political actors gladly fill. Every deleted entry should have a traceable reason; every notice should be delivered through more than one practical channel; and appeals must be processed before an election makes the remedy meaningless. Booth-level agents from recognised parties should receive usable lists, not ceremonial access to a mountain of data.
The Commission’s own electoral-roll FAQ says draft and final rolls, along with lists of claims and objections, are supplied to recognised political parties. That matters because opposition parties are not helpless spectators. They possess organisation, local workers, elected representatives and formal access. If Congress believes particular social groups are being disproportionately excluded, it should present constituency-wise evidence, deploy workers to assist claimants and litigate identifiable procedural violations. A slogan can start an inquiry. It cannot finish one.
Congress prefers accusation to organisation
What strikes me is how perfectly the current controversy fits Congress’s post-2014 habit. When the party confronts an institution it no longer controls politically, it often attacks the legitimacy of the institution before demonstrating the specific failure. Parliament is diminished when Congress loses a vote; federalism is dead when a non-Congress government uses powers earlier governments also used; election machinery becomes suspect when the electorate remains unpersuaded. This is not a defence of every institutional decision. It is a criticism of a party that treats its own decline as evidence of democratic collapse.
The electoral-roll issue offers Congress something it badly wants: a technical subject that can be converted into a moral emergency without first rebuilding booth-level competence. The unglamorous work would involve checking draft rolls street by street, training volunteers in forms and deadlines, locating migrant voters, and tracking each contested deletion. That produces few viral clips. A rally produces a stage, a villain and a montage. Congress has become much better at producing montages than majorities.
The INDIA alliance’s incentives make the rhetoric still noisier. Its parties compete with one another in several states and possess sharply different organisational capacities. A sweeping accusation against the Commission lets every ally externalise its weaknesses. If a party failed to maintain local networks, the roll becomes the explanation. If a coalition’s social arithmetic did not translate into votes, the process becomes the explanation. If a leader cannot answer a policy question, outrage becomes the answer. The common enemy is institutionally convenient because the alliance’s internal contradictions remain unresolved.
There is also an unpleasant asymmetry in the commentariat. A claim made by an opposition leader is frequently reported first as democratic alarm and examined later, if at all. A rebuttal from the Commission is treated as presumptively defensive. The sensible position is to presume neither innocence nor guilt from a press conference. Ask for the underlying categories: deaths, migration, duplication, non-response, citizenship questions, successful claims and restored entries. Numbers without denominators are propaganda accessories, whichever side supplies them.
The government should welcome harder safeguards
A pro-government position need not mean cheering administrative opacity. The Modi government and the BJP should want a revision system that survives hostile examination. Their opponents already believe every process is designed against them; secrecy or swagger will not cure that belief. Publishing machine-readable, privacy-safe aggregates at assembly-constituency level would help. So would independent procedural audits, public dashboards for claims and corrections, and clearer separation between routine roll cleaning and questions requiring more substantial documentary proof.
The burden on citizens matters. India’s state capacity is not evenly distributed, and documents that look ordinary in Delhi can be hard to retrieve after migration, marriage, disaster or decades of informal residence. Women, tenants, labourers, tribal citizens and elderly voters can face distinctive difficulties. A government that has built impressive digital public infrastructure should be able to design verification around those realities. Technology must reduce friction rather than turn a database mismatch into a presumption against the voter.
Here I will grant the opposition a point it rarely states with enough precision: scale changes risk. An error rate that looks tiny in percentage terms can affect many people in a country of India’s size. That justifies caution, phased review and redundant notice. It does not justify declaring all revision illegitimate. The answer to fallible administration is stronger process, not permanent administrative paralysis. An unrevised roll can also exclude, duplicate and misallocate. Doing nothing is a policy with victims, even if nobody organises a rally for them.
The BJP, meanwhile, should resist the temptation to answer every criticism by questioning the critic’s patriotism or historical record. Congress’s history on institutional independence is hardly spotless, and its selective memory deserves ridicule. Still, a citizen asking why a name vanished is not an INDIA spokesperson. Local BJP workers should help any eligible voter navigate restoration, including voters unlikely to support the party. Nothing would rebut the conspiracy narrative more effectively than visible, non-partisan assistance.
A rally cannot replace evidence
My test is straightforward. Show me a named locality, a defined category of eligible voters, the rules applied to them, the notices issued, and the outcome of claims. If patterns point to partisan discrimination, investigate and correct them without equivocation. If the evidence shows routine removals with accessible remedies, say so. If implementation varies across states, identify where and why. Democracy is protected by evidence granular enough to produce a remedy, not adjectives broad enough to produce applause.
The opposition’s current language often runs in the other direction. It begins with the verdict and works backward to the allegation. This may energise committed supporters, but it also makes genuine abuses harder to isolate. When every deletion is called theft, officials and neutral readers become less able to distinguish an outrageous case from an ordinary correction. Constant maximalism spends credibility that a responsible opposition may urgently need later.
I therefore support accurate electoral-roll revision and stronger safeguards simultaneously. That is not fence-sitting. It is the only position that takes both electoral integrity and individual voting rights seriously. The Commission should disclose more, communicate better and build remedies around real citizens rather than ideal paperwork. The government should encourage that openness because confidence is a public good. Congress and its allies should stop treating suspicion as proof and rallies as audits.
A democratic opposition earns authority by finding errors before the microphones arrive, helping citizens fix them and presenting verifiable patterns to the country. Congress once possessed an organisation capable of such labour. Nostalgia for that era will not recreate it. If the INDIA alliance wants to defeat the BJP, it must become better at politics on the ground. Shouting that the ground has been stolen is easier, but voters have heard that chorus before.
