Special intensive revision: What's the road ahead for the Election Commission of India?

Summary

The special revision of electoral rolls has seen several issues that left voters out of the draft rolls and raises questions about the process. Here's why India needs more transparency from the Election Commission.

During the British Raj, only the wealthy and the educated enjoyed the right to vote. After India won freedom, one of the first tasks of the leadership was to expand the electoral rolls to include all eligible adults. This was a formidable task as Partition refugees were still streaming into the country, princely states were yet to be integrated, and the rules of citizenship weren't finalized by the constituent assembly.

Despite stiff odds, independent India's first draft electoral roll was ready even before the Constitution had been enacted. A small team of civil servants ensured that even the most marginalized inhabitants found a place in the list of voters.

When Bengali refugees from what was East Pakistan then complained that they did not have any documents required, the rules were relaxed for them, historian Ornit Shani wrote in How India Became Democratic. The inclusive and empathetic nature of India's electoral processes, uncommon in the world then, ensured its legitimacy, Shani noted.

In contrast, the exclusionary nature of the latest Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has caused a legitimacy crisis for the election commission today.

This revision may have begun with the right intentions. An accurate up-to-date list of voters can help check electoral malpractices and make elections representative.

But in their zeal to eliminate wrong entries, election officials seem to have gone overboard, denying many voters the right to vote. In West Bengal, many voters found their way back to the voter list only after the elections were over, and after months of bureaucratic paperwork. The process became a test of how badly a citizen wanted to keep her right to vote.

It doesn't take much to imagine the choice an economically weak citizen would make if made to pick between earning daily wages and getting back on the electoral rolls.

Not just opposition leaders, some of the government's most vocal supporters -- including a former economic advisor to the prime minister -- have raised complaints about being left out of the draft rolls. In Congress-ruled Karnataka, members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) staged protests against the Commission.

After The Indian Express reported that two of the three election commissioners had raised objections about the SIR process, the commission relaxed some of its rules. A 26 September press note said that the updated rules were approved by "the full Commission." It did not state whether all the SIR rules and changes in voter registration forms had been approved by the full Commission or not.

There is no evidence to suggest that the exclusion of legitimate voters favoured the BJP in the Bihar and Bengal elections. But that in itself does not diminish the shortcomings in the process. It was poor and women voters who faced the brunt, since they lacked documents to satisfy an intransigent bureaucracy.

India's political class must strive to re-establish the legitimacy of one of India's most storied institutions. Rules of appointments to the commission and the manner in which it functions today need to change.

The 2023 law that tilted powers towards the government of the day to select election commissioners needs to be revisited. The commission must be independent, and seen to be so. The government needs to reach out to the Opposition and frame a national consensus. The long lever of nation building rests on a fulcrum called negotiation.