There is a familiar Delhi ritual whenever an institution takes a decision the INDIA alliance dislikes. A press conference is called, a constitutional crisis is declared, and sympathetic commentators compete to locate the darkest possible motive before reading the operational instructions. Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls received this treatment. Verification became “disenfranchisement” by lunchtime, paperwork became a conspiracy by dinner, and anyone asking whether electoral rolls should contain only eligible voters was suspected of plotting against democracy.
I do not accept that framing. The Election Commission’s initial Bihar explanation stated the legitimate objectives plainly: include eligible citizens, remove ineligible or duplicate entries, and account for deaths and migration. Its revision portal also gives voters access to roll-related services. A democracy that never checks its voter lists is not more humane. It is merely outsourcing errors to polling day, when correction is hardest and suspicion most combustible.
The opposition’s instant apocalypse
The first problem with the opposition’s response was its refusal to distinguish a valid concern from a predetermined accusation. Documentation burdens can exclude poor people, migrants, married women and citizens whose names are transliterated inconsistently. That deserves scrutiny. But the existence of administrative risk does not prove a partisan scheme. If every verification exercise is condemned before implementation, what mechanism does the opposition propose for removing dead voters, duplicate registrations or entries belonging to people who have permanently shifted?
The answer is usually a fog of phrases about existing procedures. Existing procedures produced the rolls being questioned. Ordinary Indians know how frequently addresses change, how rarely families report deaths promptly and how easily a name remains attached to an old constituency. One need not imagine armies of fraudulent voters to recognise accumulated disorder. Maintenance is not an insult to democracy; it is part of democracy’s plumbing.
I am especially tired of commentators treating requests for citizenship-related eligibility as inherently communal. The Constitution limits voting to citizens. That is not a BJP invention or a coded preference; it is the basis of the franchise. The state must apply the rule without harassment and must never assume a person is foreign because of language, religion or poverty. But saying citizenship matters is not bigotry. A political culture unable to state that elementary proposition has confused moral exhibitionism with liberalism.
Congress’s tactical incentive is obvious. It gains attention by shifting the debate from the quality of rolls to the alleged intentions of institutions. Alleging capture is easier than deploying workers to help voters file forms, examine draft lists and submit claims. The hard work of democracy is local and untelevised. It involves booth-level agents, spelling checks, photocopies, visits and appeals. A party that believes exclusions are likely should mobilise at that level first and hold a press conference second.
Where the Commission must do better
Defending verification does not require defending every timetable or communication choice. The Election Commission has often sounded as though public anxiety were an irritant manufactured by politicians. That posture is counterproductive. When millions of people are asked to confirm their electoral status, clarity is not a favour. It is an institutional duty. Instructions must be stable, translated accurately and repeated through channels that reach beyond smartphone users.
Document lists should be broad and realistic. Officials must account for citizens who lack pristine birth records, people born at home, women whose surnames or residences changed after marriage, tenants without conventional address proof, and workers moving between states. The burden cannot become a scavenger hunt through family archives. Where the administration already holds reliable records, it should use them rather than asking citizens to reproduce the state’s own data.
Most importantly, omission from a draft roll must not be treated as a verdict. Draft publication, notice, claims, objections and reasoned decisions are the safeguards that separate verification from arbitrary deletion. Citizens need enough time to respond, accessible appeal routes and written explanations. Political parties should receive usable lists, not data dumps that technically satisfy disclosure while making meaningful checking impossible.
The Commission should publish disaggregated statistics at each stage: forms distributed, forms returned, entries flagged by reason, claims received, claims accepted and appeals pending. Privacy must be protected, but aggregate transparency would puncture both complacency and conspiracy. If exclusions cluster in particular communities or districts, officials should investigate. If the numbers show successful correction, critics should acknowledge it. Evidence is more useful than adjectives.
The commentariat’s selective concern
Delhi’s outrage economy also has a memory problem. Electoral-roll defects become sacred evidence when they can be blamed on the current establishment and mundane administrative errors when they cannot. The same voices that now speak as if every clerical mismatch were an intentional purge have rarely sustained campaigns for continuous roll maintenance, easier migrant registration or better staffing of electoral offices. Their concern peaks with the political calendar.
This selectivity damages legitimate criticism. When activists identify a real exclusion, they need the public to listen. That becomes harder after weeks of maximalist claims unsupported by process-level evidence. Calling every dispute the death of democracy eventually makes the phrase useless. India has serious institutional questions; precisely for that reason, critics should ration melodrama.
The BJP, too, should avoid cheap triumphalism. Its supporters sometimes answer every concern by pointing to opposition hypocrisy or by assuming that a clean-up must politically benefit them. That is foolish. Electoral legitimacy belongs to the winner only when the loser and the voter can inspect the process. A ruling party confident in its support should want transparent rolls and generous correction procedures. Gloating over deletions would be both morally ugly and strategically shortsighted.
I also reject the argument that high voter participation alone settles roll quality. Turnout measures people who could vote, not eligible citizens who were absent from the list. Nor does a large final electorate prove every entry is valid. Different errors can coexist. The correct response is a system designed to minimise wrongful inclusion and wrongful exclusion simultaneously, not a partisan choice between them.
A better standard than manufactured outrage
My standard is straightforward. Verification is legitimate when the purpose is lawful, rules are public, evidence requirements are reasonable, assistance is widely available, draft decisions are reversible and final decisions can be appealed. It becomes illegitimate when suspicion substitutes for evidence, categories are applied selectively or deadlines make correction fictional. We should judge the exercise against those tests rather than treating institutional trust as an all-or-nothing tribal badge.
Technology can help, but it cannot be the only door. Online search, status tracking and digital forms are useful for connected voters. Bihar also requires camps, paper forms, local-language help and officials accountable for wrongful refusals. Political parties and civil-society groups should be permitted to observe and assist without turning service desks into campaign offices. The citizen should not need a party connection to preserve a constitutional right.
Longer term, India needs easier portability and continuous updating so that revisions are less dramatic. Internal migration is a permanent feature of the economy. A worker should not have to choose between retaining a hometown vote and navigating an uncertain registration process near a workplace. Better interoperability between civil registration and electoral systems could identify deaths and address changes, provided strong privacy rules and human review prevent automated mistakes from becoming final.
The INDIA alliance had a worthwhile question available: how will the Commission guarantee that eligible but poorly documented citizens remain enrolled? It weakened that question by wrapping it in claims of foreordained conspiracy. The government’s supporters, meanwhile, should not dismiss every procedural objection merely because opposition leaders amplify it. Institutions earn confidence through visible fairness, not demands for reverence.
I support the principle of revising stale rolls. I also expect the Election Commission to prove, with data and accessible remedies, that accuracy does not come at the expense of eligible voters. That position lacks the dopamine rush of declaring dictatorship on television, but it respects both constitutional eligibility and constitutional participation. Democracy is not protected by refusing to inspect its lists. It is protected by inspecting them carefully, correcting them openly and ensuring that bureaucratic impatience never erases a citizen.
