Election Commission and “Politics of Jugaad”

MC

When the Election Commission of India chooses to flub, it creates a void. And in that void, suspicion flourishes.

The press conference organised by the Election Commission of India was not a moment of virtue. It was avoidance, an instance of bureaucratic opacity woven into the state’s fabric. But to do so on a question so central to democracy–whether citizens have been improperly stripped of their right to vote–was more like a slap on the voter’s face.

Elections, in theory, rest on arithmetic: the number of eligible citizens, multiplied by participation, yields the number of votes. But India, as always, adds its own layer of improbability. In Maharashtra, for instance, opposition leaders point out that the number of votes registered in the state has outstripped its entire adult population. How does a system meant to safeguard legitimacy produce a number so mathematically absurd? It’s as if the scoreboard of democracy is showing runs scored by batsmen who have never stepped onto the pitch.

The Commission insists that the electoral system is multi-layered and decentralised, meticulously constructed by law. The draft rolls are published, shared with parties, and placed on websites; time is given for objections; appeals may be made to district magistrates and chief electoral officers. Transparency, the Commission likes to say, is its hallmark. Yet that hallmark appears increasingly tarnished.

Opposition leaders insist they did, in fact, submit affidavits pointing to errors–errors that include people alive declared dead, and those who voted in the recent general election struck from the rolls altogether. AkhileshYadav, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, says his party can even show acknowledgement receipts from the Commission. The Commission’s response? It hasn’t received them. Yadav, dryly, offers a counter: perhaps Digital India itself–the government’s cherished initiative–is now in doubt.

The immediate controversy lies in Bihar, where the Commission launched what it calls a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the rolls this June, despite two obvious obstacles. First, the state was submerged in monsoon floods, its villages marooned, its fields resembling lakes. Second, the Commission’s own guidelines prohibit intensive revisions in an election year.

The logic is simple: changing rolls too close to voting undermines stability. Yet in Bihar, stability was sacrificed to speed. Why the hurry? Why insist that enumerators knock on doors in villages half-underwater, demanding forms that, in many cases, were filed without documents, or marked by local officers as “not recommended” on bases never explained?

YogendraYadav, one of the sharpest critics of the Commission, rattled off a list of ten unanswered questions from that same press conference. Why were parties not consulted before the revision? How many electors were added between June 25th and July 25th? How many foreigners were detected? Why the format of the rolls changed after Rahul Gandhi was raised questions in a public press conference? These are not the queries of a conspiracy theorist; they are the questions of a statistician, pointing to cracks in the ledger that should be the foundation of legitimacy.

When pressed, the Commission sometimes replies with flimsy explanations that collapse under their own weight. At one point, the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar Gupta, remarked that even if the same person was registered in multiple places, they would still only cast one vote. The implication: duplication is not really a problem. But what is duplication, if not an open door to manipulation?

Gupta’s line is remarkable for its candour. It’s the equivalent of a bank manager saying that if someone has multiple ATM cards for the same account, no harm will come–as if fraud is merely a theoretical inconvenience, not a systemic risk. Critics now ask: is Gupta willing to stand by this argument on affidavit in court?

Other explanations verge on the bizarre. Opposition parties have long demanded access to CCTV footage of polling booths–not to make it public, but to examine anomalies in voting patterns and identify bogus votes. The Commission’s response was to warn against “making videos of our wives, mothers, and sisters public.”

By that logic, one might reasonably ask, why record them at all? If the very act of filming is defensible, then so too is the act of auditing. To invert that logic is to sound less like a guardian of democracy and more like a hotel manager caught planting cameras in changing rooms, protesting that releasing the footage would be indecent.

It is this inversion of responsibility that most disturbs critics. The Election Commission has always occupied a peculiar space in Indian public life: quasi-sacred, part umpire, part priest. It is one of the few institutions meant to rise above politics, its neutrality the coin of its realm. But in recent years, its credibility has come under siege.

When journalists asked why DevendraFadnavis, the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra and a senior leader of the ruling BJP, was answering questions about electoral rolls on the Commission’s behalf, the symbolism was hard to ignore. An umpire cannot outsource his explanations to a player, least of all to the captain of one of the teams on the field.

The Commission’s defenders argue that much of this noise comes from political parties that neglected to scrutinise the rolls when given the chance. The process, they note, allows a whole month for claims and objections. If parties slept through that window, they have only themselves to blame. Yet this defence assumes a level playing field. It assumes, too, that the publication of rolls in the correct format, at the right time, was consistently executed.

In reality, the Commission has refused to provide machine-readable digital rolls, insisting instead on formats that hinder large-scale analysis. It has declined requests for affidavits verifying digital receipts and resisted inquiries into affidavits filed by parties in past elections. If transparency is its hallmark, then why these smudges on the glass?

Consider also the language used. Critics like Paranjay Guha Thakurta describe the press conference as a “sham.” YogendraYadav lists questions not as speculative musings but as demands for data: how many enumeration forms without documents, how many marked “not recommended,” how many foreigners detected.

Each is answerable with a number. Each was met with evasion. The longer the Commission withholds such numbers, the more the suspicion grows that the numbers themselves are unflattering.

Elections in India have always been messy–what political scientists once described as a “politics of jugaad.” But improvisation, in small doses, is different from systemic opacity. When living people are declared dead, when past voters are struck off rolls, when numbers exceed populations, when revisions are launched in flood zones against official guidelines, improvisation becomes distortion. And distortion, at scale, undermines trust.

The Commission insists that its process is robust because it is decentralised. Booth-level officers, it says, shoulder the responsibility for accuracy. However, decentralisation is only as good as accountability. When forms are filed without documents, when local officers “recommend” or “not recommend” entries without explanation, decentralisation becomes diffusion: everyone is responsible, and so no one is.

Akhilesh Yadav’s provocation–that the Commission itself should file affidavits verifying its digital acknowledgements–captures the absurdity of the moment. The very institution entrusted with securing the integrity of elections now faces demands to certify its own signatures. It is not simply that opposition parties don’t trust the numbers; it is that they don’t trust the guardians of the numbers.

What is left, then, is irony. As one opposition leader put it earlier, vote theft was done quietly, in hiding. Now it is done openly, in the name of “special revisions.” Earlier, citizens worried about ballot-box stuffing in remote villages; now they worry about the official who refuses to answer a question in the capital. Silence, once tactical, now sounds like complicity.

The great strength of Indian democracy has always been its acceptance of noise–the clamour of parties, the cacophony of rallies, and the chaos of election days. But noise is different from silence. When the Election Commission chooses to flub, it creates a void. And in that void, suspicion flourishes.

The real risk is not that one side cheats more cleverly than another; it is that citizens lose faith in the very scoreboard. When the scoreboard itself becomes contested–when the number of votes exceeds the number of players–democracy ceases to be a game worth playing.

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 12, Sep 14 - 20, 2025