The election commissioner Modi cannot afford to lose

India has a long and distinguished tradition of protesting against its government. Farmers protest against farm laws and students protest against universities. Workers protest against wages and opposition parties protest against practically everything.

The police arrive, barricades go up, television anchors discover a national conspiracy, and democracy resumes its familiar argument with itself.

But the protests now shaking Delhi are different. The demonstrators are not simply demanding that Narendra Modi change a policy or dismiss a minister. They want the man entrusted with safeguarding India's elections to resign. That is a very awkward proposition. An unprecedented one for India too.

Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has become the villain of a political drama that goes considerably beyond electoral rolls. His critics accuse him of presiding over a revision exercise that has removed millions of voters, disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities. They allege that an institution meant to referee elections has begun behaving like a participant.

The government rejects the allegations. The Bharatiya Janata Party insists that the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, is a legitimate effort to eliminate dead, duplicate and ineligible voters. But that defence has a problem. Cleaning electoral rolls is an administrative duty. Convincing citizens that the cleaning is fair is a constitutional obligation. India appears to have managed the first at the expense of the second. And now the cleaner himself is being asked to leave.

Over the weekend, Delhi resembled a city preparing for an invasion.

Barricades, police deployments and mass detentions accompanied demonstrations demanding CEC Kumar's resignation. On Monday, opposition parties mobilised tens of thousands of supporters and presented a petition to the Supreme Court. Cockroach Janta Party, the youth-led movement, helped turn a technical dispute into a national protest. 

India has witnessed much ‘larger’ protests. The Emergency, the anti-corruption movement, the citizenship law agitation and the farmers' movement all challenged the exercise of political power. But the present protest questions the machinery through which political power acquires legitimacy.

And that matters, very much.

A government can withdraw a law and survive. It can sack a minister and call it accountability. It can concede a policy mistake and blame an overenthusiastic bureaucrat. But what does a government do when the institution certifying its electoral victories is accused of systematically favouring it?

There is, let’s say, no convenient press release for that.

When the referee becomes the accused

The immediate controversy concerns SIR, which began in Bihar and expanded into other states. Approximately 130 million names have been removed from electoral rolls since last year. That figure is extraordinary, although it must not be confused with proof that 130 million eligible citizens were unlawfully disenfranchised. 

Some deletions concern deaths, duplication and migration. But the problem is how many legitimate voters were excluded and by what procedures, and with what opportunities for redress, is very unclear.

Those questions demand answers with evidence, yet the evidence already available is sufficiently troubling to warrant an independent examination. In Bihar, more than six million names were removed during the revision process. In West Bengal, citizens who had voted for decades found themselves required to establish their eligibility again.

One reported case is particularly disturbing. Shahida Fakir, a 38-year-old woman from West Bengal, produced family documents and historical electoral records but disappeared from the revised roll. She was subsequently accused of being an illegal immigrant and pushed across the Bangladesh border while her challenge remained unresolved. Her case has reached the courts. 

It is difficult to imagine a more perverse bureaucratic achievement…a citizen presents documents proving her connection to a country, only to be told that the country has misplaced her. The state, apparently, never loses its authority. Only its paperwork.

This is the deeper absurdity exposed by the controversy. A republic that possesses the administrative capacity to track financial transactions, collect biometric information and conduct elections involving hundreds of millions of people is now demanding that ordinary citizens establish facts about their existence that its own records previously acknowledged.

The burden of proof has changed address. It now lives with the voter. And the poorest voters have the least room for administrative error.

The procedural concerns extend well beyond individual cases. In September, The Indian Express reported that two other election commissioners of a three member commission had raised 14 objections to aspects of voter exclusion, only to be overruled by Kumar. The revelation helped transform simmering resentment into a national movement.

This was no longer merely an argument between the opposition and the Election Commission. Questions were emerging from inside the institution itself.

Three former election commissioners have also criticised the exercise. Former chief election commissioner OP Rawat described changes to voter registration procedures as wrong and illegal. Ashok Lavasa called for SIR to be scrapped. SY Quraishi alleged that the exercise was designed to remove Muslims from electoral rolls. These are serious allegations and they cannot sensibly be dismissed as the complaints of defeated politicians. 

The Election Commission has itself introduced corrective measures, including restrictions on mass submission of voter-deletion objections. That suggests recognition of procedural vulnerabilities. It is not, however, an admission that CEC Kumar deliberately manipulated elections.

The difference is essential. Administrative failure, institutional negligence and deliberate electoral fraud are different offences. Conflating them would make an already dangerous controversy worse. But the government faces a political trap precisely because these distinctions are becoming harder to communicate.

The resignation Modi cannot afford

Consider CEC Kumar's resignation.

Were he to resign under pressure over SIR, it would not legally establish guilt. Resignations are not convictions. Officials leave office for many reasons, including to restore confidence in institutions. Politically, however, the consequences would be explosive.

The opposition would present his departure as vindication of its allegations. Every election conducted under the disputed arrangements would face renewed scrutiny. The BJP's victories in Bihar and West Bengal would become subjects of still more intense argument, regardless of whether wrongdoing had been established.

PM Modi would then face a question no government enjoys answering: if the referee had to leave because the contest was compromised, why should the winners remain beyond scrutiny?

That is why Kumar's position has become inseparable from the government's political credibility.

There is an additional complication. The 2023 law governing appointments to the Election Commission replaced the chief justice of India on the selection committee with a Union cabinet minister. The prime minister and a minister nominated by him therefore form a majority on the three-member panel, alongside the opposition leader.

The arrangement is lawful. But legality does not automatically confer public confidence, particularly when an appointee faces allegations of favouring the government responsible for his selection.

As Pranab Dhal Samanta observed in The Times of India, the Election Commission now faces widening trust gaps with voters, opposition parties and its own institutional machinery.  An election commission can survive criticism from a losing candidate. It cannot function indefinitely without the confidence of the electorate.

When the voters stop trusting the vote

Rahul Gandhi's campaign against alleged vote theft initially struggled to capture national attention. Powerpoint presentations about electoral data are not ordinarily the stuff of revolution. India has never lacked politicians accusing one another of stealing elections.

But numbers acquired names. Names acquired faces. And the faces began appearing on television, explaining how the state had apparently forgotten that they existed.

The opposition's allegations, the internal objections and the experiences of excluded voters eventually converged. Young protesters supplied the energy that parliamentary speeches had failed to generate.

This is the ‘remarkable’ feature of Delhi's current agitation. It is not simply an opposition campaign against Modi. It is a crisis of confidence in the constitutional umpire, with ordinary voters demanding to know whether they are still entitled to enter the stadium.

The BJP is entitled to defend the revision process. Electoral rolls must be accurate. Fraudulent registrations should be removed. But the answer to concerns about wrongful exclusions cannot simply be that affected citizens may apply again. The burden of correcting an official error should not automatically fall on its victim.

Nor should criticism of the Election Commission be treated as an attack on democracy. Constitutional institutions earn their independence through demonstrable impartiality, not immunity from scrutiny.

India's immediate need is an independent, transparent examination of the disputed deletions, meaningful remedies for eligible voters and full disclosure of the decisions behind SIR. CEC Kumar's resignation alone would not restore a single missing vote.

Modi has spent more than a decade demonstrating his formidable ability to win elections. His government now faces a question more difficult than winning another one… whether enough Indians still trust the people counting and certifying the votes.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa