Amidst whirlwind changes affecting the fundamentals of American democracy, the Indian diaspora may have overlooked a development in India, which faces similar challenges. For the most populous democracy, it is potentially an opportunity for course-correction, and the opposition is mulling the impeachment of the Chief Election Commissioner. Following due diligence on voter lists by the Congress party, the BJP-led government is in a credibility crisis ― the very mandate by which it rules is in question. “Vote chori” (election theft) has united the opposition parties like never before and they have taken the issue to the streets. But can this loose coalition, which had earlier failed to find common cause, sustain the momentum?

The opposition has alleged electoral malpractice ever since the BJP swept the rug from under their feet in 2014. But their focus was on EVMs, the electronic voting machines which were once seen as a technological solution to the paper-era practices of ‘booth capturing’ and ‘ballot-stuffing’ ― violently seizing polling stations and filling ballot boxes with fake votes. TN Seshan, chief election commissioner from 1990 to ’96, introduced video surveillance to combat these problems, and worked towards the adoption of EVMs. Seshan was awarded the Magsaysay Prize for his electoral reforms and was perceived to have enabled, for the first time ever, elections which actually reflected the people’s will.

But after the BJP gained an overwhelming majority in 2014, the opposition saw the EVM as an electoral tool manipulated by the ruling party. Over the years, EVM errors favoring the BJP were reported in multiple elections, but malpractice without physical access was never proven, and the machines are always isolated from networks and the internet when in use. Of course, before every election, agents of the Election Commission flash them with the symbols of contending parties and afterwards, results are downloaded for tallying, but the EC has been a trusted watchdog until about a decade ago. And since researchers were not allowed to investigate live machines in the course of polls in order to maintain the sanctity of the vote, EVM forensics became a dead end.

In 2023, in a paper titled ‘Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy’, Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University offered a non-technology explanation of the 2019 election ― the BJP may have won a disproportionately big share of closely contested seats by the manipulation of voter lists, especially by the selective disenfranchisement of minorities, particularly Muslims. Das said that while his research did not prove widespread fraud, it raised questions about the integrity of elections. He was forced to leave his position at Ashoka University.

Now, based on the analysis of primary voter data, the Congress has escalated the charge to that of widespread fraud. Its investigation gained urgency due to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls for the Bihar state elections due this year, mandated by the Election Commission. The opposition fears that the revision could weed out 20 million valid voters in areas with marginalized communities and opposition leanings, swinging state polls to favour the ruling party. 

Congress volunteers sifted through electoral rolls of the Mahadevapura constituency in Bengaluru, a densely populated suburb with a high migrant population. From January, the Congress has sought its poll data for an independent audit, but the EC was reluctant. Meanwhile, the media site Newslaundry reported mass deletions and additions of voters in Farrukhabad, Meerut and Chandni Chowk. In the last, they found that voters from Muslim and lower caste areas were three times more likely to be deleted than voters in upper caste Hindu areas. On August 11, The Reporters’ Collective found thousands of dubious voters from Uttar Pradesh transplanted to a constituency in Bihar. Did such anomalies explain the EC’s reluctance to share details of its Bihar audit with the Supreme Court, and to share the Mahadevapura lists with Rahul Gandhi? On August 14, the Supreme Court forced the EC to share the Bihar data on additions and deletions in machine-readable format. The Congress had not been so lucky with the data for Mahadevapura, which it had got in towering piles of non-machine readable paper, but it had slogged its way through.

In Mahadevapura, the Congress has discovered 100,250 fake voters, including 40,009 with fake or invalid street addresses, like ‘house number 0’, 10,452 voters crowded into tiny premises, and 33,692 first-time voters aged 60-90 who were included by a rule which applies only to young people. Some voters’ home addresses were commercial premises, like a microbrewery or a factory. Others had multiple unique IDs bearing shrunken photographs, using which they could vote multiple times in one constituency, or in multiple constituencies, in multiple states, which is illegal. On this basis, Rahul Gandhi alleges that manipulation helped the BJP to win the Bangalore Central parliamentary seat in 2024. If such voter list manipulation was done to nudge results in tightly contested seats, the BJP could have bagged 26 seats extra in the 2024 general election. Was the EC asleep at the wheel? Or worse, did it look the other way? The Congress and other opposition parties want to know.

The media likes to call the BJP’s electoral machine a juggernaut. Is this the octane which keeps it rolling? Does it also explain the growing unreliability of opinion and exit polls, which has driven Indian psephology to despair? 

Prior to all this, the government had controversially altered the process by which election commissioners are chosen. Originally, it was simple: the president chose someone on the advice of the prime minister. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in a public interest case that a committee of the PM, the leader of the opposition in the lower house of Parliament and the Chief Justice of India would make appointments, until Parliament legislated on the matter. Right away, the government legislated to replace the Chief Justice with a Union cabinet minister. With a 2:1 majority, the executive can legally pack the EC with its own people.

What data did the Election Commission supply to the Congress? The party had sought machine-readable voter lists and video evidence from the voting booth surveillance apparatus that Seshan had set up in the Nineties. Instead, it was provided with three giant stacks of paper, each over seven feet tall, which were not machine readable and took months to analyze and tally. In June, the Commission also directed state election commissioners to destroy video evidence 45 days after elections, if there was no court challenge, for fear that it could be “misused” to create “malicious narratives”.

Before it will act on the findings of the Congress, the EC wants Rahul Gandhi to submit not just aggregate numbers of deletions and additions, but individual claims and objections under the Registration of Electors Rules, backed by a signed affidavit, for each finding. It wants the matter to go to court, in a frustratingly tardy legal system. Earlier, Arvind Kejriwal and Akhilesh Yadav, who had been chief ministers of states, had submitted evidence of poll manipulation with affidavits. Nothing much had happened. So this time, Rahul Gandhi and opposition politicians took to the streets. He said it was not just politics, but a defense of the Constitution.

For the first time in a decade, the opposition is united by a fundamental issue of democracy. This is an inconvenient problem for the Indian government when it is sorely beset. Tensions with China had already erased its claim of proximity to Xi Jinping. Tenderized by tariffs, India has now lost its claim of a special relationship with the US. Moreover, the US insists on access to India’s agricultural products and dairy markets. If the government gives in, another farmers’ agitation would take over national affairs.

The PM’s own electoral performance is sliding. His victory margin in Varanasi has fallen by 41% since 2014. The allegation of voter list manipulation makes the BJP ‘juggernaut’ look less imposing. Fraud is not conclusively proven, but it seriously erodes the perceived solidity of the party’s mandate, and the stalling tactics of the Election Commission suggest that there is something to hide.

This election issue has come up exactly when the PM needs to look strong to deal with international challenges on rapidly shifting ground. The RSS, which backs this government, also seems to be hinting that it is time for him to let go of power. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said this week that leaders should make way for their successors at the age of 75. Perhaps he was referring to himself, but he is the same age as the PM, who will turn 75 on September 17.

Retirement at 75 is an informal policy invented by the PM himself, which he used to make irrelevant LK Advani, his predecessor and mentor, the pioneer of mass Hindutva who made the Ram Temple movement the most emotive force in Indian politics. He was a manager of LK Advani’s 1990 rathyatra, which put the BJP on the road to electoral dominance. It would be ironic if the RSS, which groomed him for politics and which is not happy to be overshadowed by him, wants him out according to his own policy, and the Congress has given it a handy excuse by challenging the BJP’s electoral credibility.