Erosion of Election Commission’s Credibility

Social activist Anjali Bhardwaj spoke on the relationship between nationhood, citizenship and elections, with a particular focus on the Election Commission of India (ECI). She said that the Commission’s credibility was now seriously in doubt and that public confidence had been eroded by what she described as partisanship, both in the enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct and in its handling of elections more generally. She referred to concerns that voter turnout figures had increased significantly between the provisional figures available at the close of polling and the final figures later released by the ECI. In her view, this had generated apprehension about the integrity of the electoral process and made disclosure of contemporaneous polling records, such as Form 17C, all the more important. She said that disclosure requests had consistently been resisted by the ECI. She also referred to demands made after recent elections for closed circuit television (CCTV) footage and polling diaries, and said that access had been denied notwithstanding the importance of such material to public scrutiny. In this context, she referred to amendments made to the legal framework governing access to electoral records and said that allegations of manipulation had been dismissed without serious examination.  She then turned to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter rolls, which she described as a process initiated without consultation, without transparent reasons, and without any clear public identification of the decision-maker. She said that when the ECI was asked to disclose the basis for the exercise, it responded in a puzzling fashion, stating that no reasons were available in the public domain. In relation to the scale of the exercise, she said that crores of voters had already been excluded, with estimates suggesting the number could rise further during the pan-India exercise. Referring to West Bengal, she said that a ‘secret algorithm’ had reportedly been used to identify large numbers of names for deletion. Polling, she noted, took place while appeals against exclusion were pending. She also referred to the unresolved challenge in the Supreme Court concerning a non-partisan appointment procedure for Election Commissioners after Anoop Baranwal’s case, and suggested that these issues, taken together, had deepened the institutional crisis of electoral administration.