New Delhi, India – Indian democracy has been shaken by new revelations showing divisions within the body that is in charge of conducting its elections over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people. India’s Election Commission, a supposedly autonomous constitutional body, is tasked with administering elections in the world’s largest democracy, and in recent decades, had won admirers across the globe for its success in conducting a voting process unmatched in scale and complexity. But an investigation by The Indian Express newspaper reported that the current chief of the commission frequently overruled concerns raised by his two other equally ranked commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database.
These revelations come after a months-long struggle by India’s opposition parties to bring what they have described as the “sabotaging” conduct of the election commission to the fore, which they say is dictated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party for its electoral benefit. For decades, India has grappled with deep inequality; divisions along caste, religious and ethnic lines; and the growing role of money in its elections. Yet through it all, the actual conduct of its elections was largely viewed as “free” domestically and by global monitors.
But leading opposition leaders have, in recent months and years, for the first time, questioned whether elections can be trusted and whether votes are counted accurately, as well as whether rights decide who gets to be a voter or if those in authority take the decision arbitrarily. Those concerns, say analysts, are likely to only be amplified by the latest revelations. It is very shocking for the nation,” SY Quraishi, who headed India’s election commission between 2010 and 2012, told Al Jazeera.
Now, it is totally dysfunctional – and that’s an understatement.” So, what does this mean for India and its democracy? Earlier this week, the Indian Express newspaper published a series of stories, based on internal documents and interviews, laying bare divisions within the poll panel – consisting of three commissioners, Gyanesh Kumar, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, and Vivek Joshi. Kumar is the commission’s chief.
Indian law requires the commission to decide by a majority. Reports revealed that Sandhu and Joshi resisted and questioned the legality of measures Kumar took unilaterally. Since June last year, the commission has been revising and updating the voters list state-wise.
It has struck off more than 13 million names during the exercise since then, which the critics say targeted economically weaker sections, minorities, and other vulnerable groups of Indian society disproportionately. Opposition parties took the matter to the country’s top court, which largely signed off on the process to decide on who gets to vote in India. For India’s more than 1.4 billion population, a voting right does not end merely on ballots – rather, several government welfare schemes are tied to voting rights.
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