I have a confession that will disappoint people who imagine every BJP-friendly columnist wakes up eager to applaud officialdom: I do not instinctively trust a database. Databases contain duplicate entries, outdated addresses, spelling errors and decisions made by tired human beings staring at badly designed screens. An electoral roll deserves more suspicion than most because an error can deny a citizen the most basic democratic act. What I will not do, however, is leap from “this process requires scrutiny” to “the election has been stolen” merely because Rahul Gandhi has found another phrase that travels well on social media.
The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has become the INDIA alliance’s preferred stage. Its leaders have marched, announced rallies and used increasingly incendiary language about the Election Commission. The Indian Express reported the alliance’s demand for ballot papers and its protest programme, including accusations that the Commission was acting at the government’s command. Those are not routine complaints. They question whether India’s elections possess any legitimacy at all. Such a charge demands evidence proportionate to its gravity.
Instead, we are repeatedly offered a political syllogism: the BJP wins; the Opposition expected it to lose; therefore, the machinery must have been manipulated. That may be emotionally satisfying after defeat, but it is not an audit. A democracy cannot operate on the principle that an institution is independent only when it produces the result the Congress prefers.
Roll revision is necessary, not sinister
India’s electoral rolls are living documents in a country of extraordinary internal migration. Citizens die, move cities, marry and change addresses. Young people become eligible every day. Some voters remain registered in more than one place because deletion and enrolment systems do not speak to each other cleanly. Anyone who has tried to correct an address on a government record knows that administrative friction is not a conspiracy; it is practically a national design language.
That is precisely why revisions are required. The reasonable question is not whether rolls should be cleaned but how the process protects eligible citizens while removing demonstrably invalid entries. The Election Commission should publish granular data, provide accessible claims and objections, explain deletion categories, and permit meaningful review. Political parties should deploy booth-level agents, examine draft rolls and help genuine voters correct records. Those are concrete safeguards.
The Opposition’s current rhetoric often makes that work harder. If every notice is described as disenfranchisement and every deletion as theft, workers are encouraged to reject the process wholesale rather than identify individual errors. A mass slogan cannot restore one wrongly omitted name. A properly documented claim can.
I find Amit Shah’s offer to discuss the matter in Parliament strategically and substantively correct. Public reporting recorded his willingness to convene a special session on SIR. The Opposition should accept. Put the numbers, legal objections and proposed remedies on the table. Let ministers answer. Let the debate be recorded rather than conducted through clipped videos and theatrical marches.
The Commission must earn confidence
Supporting revision does not mean giving the Election Commission a blank cheque. The Commission’s authority depends not only on formal independence but on public confidence, and confidence is earned through boring virtues: consistency, prompt disclosure, intelligible orders and visible willingness to correct mistakes. When commissioners disagree internally, the institution should have procedures that make collective decision-making credible. When large numbers of entries are affected, explanations should arrive before rumours fill the vacuum.
I would go further. The Commission should make machine-readable constituency-level change data available, with privacy protections, so parties and independent researchers can compare additions, deletions and corrections. It should publish standard reasons for rejection and the average time taken to resolve appeals. It should conduct public demonstrations of the claims process in multiple languages. None of this concedes that an election was stolen. It demonstrates the government side’s confidence that the process can withstand examination.
The BJP also has a responsibility. Its spokespeople are entitled to rebut accusations, but not every criticism needs to be answered with a darker counter-allegation. A ruling party benefits when citizens trust elections, including elections it loses. The strongest pro-government response is therefore procedural openness, not merely partisan combat. If the Opposition supplies vague claims, ask for names, booths and records. If it supplies genuine cases, help correct them. Administrative competence is a better political answer than indignation.
This is where I differ from those who treat any request for transparency as surrender. A confident government should welcome an audit trail. Narendra Modi’s political appeal has rested partly on the claim that the state can execute at scale. Electoral administration is exactly where that claim should be demonstrated with dashboards, deadlines and accountable officers.
Congress cannot outsource introspection
The Congress has a deeper problem that no march to Nirvachan Sadan can solve. Its organisation is uneven, its messaging oscillates between welfare promises and apocalyptic warnings, and its state units frequently spend more energy fighting one another than fighting the BJP. When the party loses, institutional accusations provide a convenient escape from evaluating candidate selection, local alliances, leadership and booth management.
This habit is politically corrosive because it trains supporters to believe that ordinary persuasion no longer matters. Why recruit workers, revise membership lists or build municipal-level leadership if the outcome is supposedly determined elsewhere? The BJP’s organisational advantage did not materialise through a secret switch. It was built through years of local presence, ideological training, welfare outreach and relentless election management. One may dislike that machine, but pretending it does not exist is not a strategy.
The INDIA alliance’s internal contradictions make the accusation even less convincing. Parties that allege systemic manipulation still celebrate victories produced by the same broad electoral architecture. They trust the voter and the Commission when they win a state, then discover institutional collapse when they lose another. That selective legitimacy resembles a batsman approving the umpire’s eyesight after a boundary and questioning the entire sport after being given out.
There is a fair counterargument: opposition parties do not control the Union government, and institutions must therefore meet a higher burden of visible independence. I agree. The Commission should answer detailed questions and courts should hear justiciable grievances without delay. But an asymmetry of power does not relieve accusers of the burden of proof. It increases the importance of precise evidence.
Replace the slogan with a ledger
If I were advising the Opposition, I would tell it to abandon the grand phrase “vote theft” unless it can attach a ledger to it. Publish verified case files: voter name, previous roll entry, deletion reason, notice history, appeal status and final outcome. Protect personal data but make the methodology replicable. Commission reputable statisticians. Distinguish clerical mistakes from unlawful exclusions. Separate allegations about roll revision from arguments about electronic voting machines. At present, these complaints are often blended into one cloud of suspicion.
I would also demand that the government support stronger statutory timelines for corrections near polling day. A right without an effective remedy is ornamental. Voters should receive clear notifications when records change, and no eligible citizen should have to navigate a maze of offices because an operator clicked the wrong field. These reforms are compatible with, indeed essential to, clean rolls.
What I reject is the idea that democratic seriousness is measured by the volume of an accusation. Calling constitutional authorities thieves may excite a rally, but it also poisons the space in which practical reforms must be negotiated. Congress veterans once understood institutions well enough to argue through memoranda, parliamentary committees and legal challenges. Their successors increasingly behave as though a hashtag is a substitute for a brief.
The government should grant scrutiny and the Opposition should supply specificity. That is the bargain mature politics requires. Until the INDIA alliance produces evidence that matches its language, I will regard its SIR campaign as political theatre built around a legitimate administrative subject. The rolls must be accurate, every eligible citizen must be protected, and every mistake must be correctable. None of those principles requires accepting a conspiracy merely because Rahul Gandhi repeats it from a larger stage.
