NEW DELHI — There is a familiar rhythm to Indian politics: when the verdict disappoints, the umpire is blamed. This month that rhythm has returned, as the INDIA bloc and the youth-led outfit that calls itself the CJP took to the streets demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was briefly detained during a march to the Election Commission; the CJP, led by Abhijeet Dipke, has staged demonstrations from Shivaji Park in Mumbai to protest sites across several states, with more planned.
What the agitation is about
At the centre is the SIR — the exercise of intensively revising electoral rolls to remove duplicate, deceased and ineligible entries and to add genuine new voters. The Opposition’s case leans partly on the fact that two Election Commissioners are reported to have recorded internal objections on multiple occasions over several months to decisions they said were taken without their full knowledge. That is a legitimate point of process, and it deserves to be examined — within the Commission and, if necessary, the courts.
But the leap from “two commissioners filed internal objections” to “the Chief Election Commissioner must resign and the rolls are rigged” is a very long one, and the institutions designed to test exactly that claim have not made it.
The courts have already weighed in
Most tellingly, the Supreme Court declined to pass any order suspending Gyanesh Kumar. For a judiciary that has never been shy of checking the executive or the Commission when it sees genuine wrongdoing, that reluctance is significant. It suggests that the courts, looking at the same facts the protesters cite, did not find a case grave enough to override a constitutional authority mid-term. In a republic, that is how such disputes are supposed to be resolved — through evidence and due process, not through the size of a crowd at Jantar Mantar.
Clean rolls are not an attack on democracy
There is a deeper irony. A revision that removes ghost voters and tightens the rolls is, by any honest reckoning, a strengthening of democracy, not a subversion of it. It was only recently that India’s photo-ID, paper-trail electoral system was held up abroad — including by the President of the United States — as a model of integrity. An Election Commission that insists on accurate rolls is doing the unglamorous work that makes such praise possible. Every name wrongly on a list dilutes a genuine vote; cleaning the register protects the honest voter.
The politics of the permanent grievance
None of this means the Commission is above scrutiny — no institution is, and the commissioners’ recorded concerns should be addressed transparently. But there is a difference between scrutiny and a resignation campaign launched on the streets. The former strengthens institutions; the latter seeks to delegitimise them in advance of verdicts not yet delivered. India has seen this script before: question the EVMs, question the rolls, question the referee — everything except the possibility that the voter simply chose otherwise.
The electoral rolls of the world’s largest democracy will be settled where they always are — in the Commission’s process and, where contested, in the courts. They will not be rewritten by a march, however loud. That is not a weakness of the system. It is the whole point of it.
