What option do people have but to protest?

Never before has the country seen public protests on Gandhi Jayanti the way we did this year. As a pithy social media meme put it, 2 October is the day those who celebrate Gandhi’s killers are forced to pay homage to him.

Mahatma Gandhi, who inspired the world with his ideals of truth, non-violence and satyagraha, epitomised the power of peaceful protest by ordinary, unarmed people. That legacy came alive across India on his 157th birth anniversary as the youth lustily embraced his idea of non-violent protest.

Those who had started believing that Gandhi had lost his relevance were in for a shock. An image of a solitary woman standing with a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi on a makeshift stage at a street corner CPI(M) meeting in Kolkata even as a violent right-wing mob broke up the gathering deserved to be seen by many more people. As the mob threw chairs, tore up banners and posters and mouthed profanities, she stood still and defiant as a rock.

Hundreds of student activists and citizens, young and old, defied the intimidating deployment of security forces around a fortified Jantar Mantar in Delhi. The viciousness of their detention was no surprise (Jantar Mantar 1.0 is still fresh in our memories). Even as older citizens stoically marched in solidarity, the younger lot around Jantar Mantar chanted slogans, strummed guitars, raised questions, toppled barricades, slipped through police cordons, cracked jokes into camera. When put into buses, they simply jumped out of the windows and rejoined the protests. One young woman ran away with the ignition key of one of the buses in Delhi.

In Mumbai, Shivaji Park resounded with hundreds singing the national anthem, by choice, not diktat. While one viral video showed a policewoman abusing young women protestors calling them and their mothers besharam (shameless), another showed a protective circle of protestors fanning a woman cop who had fainted while on duty.

Even as the youngsters invoked the Gandhian legacy of peaceful protest, the government resurrected memories of the colonial mode of using brute force to crush civil disobedience.

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The rallying call for citizens across India is threefold: the immediate resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, the scrapping of the SIR and the restoration of the voting rights of every wrongfully deleted voter. Citizens have realised the importance of repealing the 2023 Act that gave the government a free hand to choose its own Election Commission (with no members of the Opposition represented) and placed election commissioners above the law by granting them lifelong immunity.

The explosive Indian Express report (25 September) on dissension within the ECI and its subsequent crisis management have only served to strengthen public outcry.

Following up on the 14 objections raised in 10 months by two of the three election commissioners, the Indian Express published another investigation on 6 October. This revealed that 11 appellate tribunal heads met on 11 August and raised at least five key defects in the portal for submitting appeals. What was once a suspicion is now a fact: a massive institutional fraud has been inflicted on India’s electoral democracy and the constitutional right of universal adult franchise.

Now that the entire country is talking about the disenfranchisement of more than 130 million voters, the ECI has asked all chief electoral officers (CEOs) to reach out to all the left-out voters within a month! The term ‘left out’ is a fantastic euphemism for arbitrary and targeted exclusion, designed to tilt the electoral balance in favour of the BJP and its allies.

Even as the ECI was issuing this circular on 1 October, CPI(ML) activists were holding a public hearing of excluded voters in Patna. Party workers had carried out a door-to-door verification survey between June and September in 50 select booths over 10 of the 20 constituencies contested by the party in the 2025 Bihar assembly elections.

They did precisely what the ECI has now asked BLOs to do: identify excluded voters by comparing the post-SIR electoral roll with the pre-SIR June 2025 roll. The survey revealed that wrongful deletion stood at a shocking 17 per cent.

Form 6 and Form 7 have both been weaponised by the BJP and the ECI not only to engineer mass exclusions but also to add names selectively to the electoral roll. On 6 October, Reporters’ Collective revealed as many as 16.18 lakh voters were added to UP’s electoral roll in the initial phase of the SIR: neither their names nor details were listed.

Now that alterations made in Form 6 have been exposed as arbitrary, unauthorised and illegal — because making changes in the clauses of the form is the exclusive prerogative of Parliament — the ECI has withdrawn the controversial clauses without any explanation. Its attempt to claim the Supreme Court had approved the changes has been refuted by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant. The changes were clearly made to obstruct the inclusion of Gen Z voters in the electoral roll.

Form 6 is meant to serve as the entry route for first-time voters. Compelling voters who have been excluded from the electoral roll to use the same form as a condition for re-entry is patently illegal. Despite objections from day one, the ECI has persisted with this malpractice.

Even more sinister has been the industrial-scale misuse of Form 7 to exclude eligible voters. The confiscation of bundles of pre-filled Form 7 applications points to a systematic effort to target Muslim voters and those likely to vote against the BJP and its allies.

Where a Form 7 complaint is used to seek the deletion of a voter’s name from the electoral roll, the voter must be given proper notice and a genuine opportunity to respond before any such deletion is made. This basic safeguard has been routinely disregarded.

The most shocking pattern of targeting and victimisation has been witnessed in West Bengal. Justice (retd) Indrajit Chatterjee, who has since quit as chair of Appellate Tribunal 11, revealed that 2.54 lakh Form 7 appeals were filed before his own tribunal by none other than the additional chief electoral officer of West Bengal seeking exclusion of voters who had been found eligible by judicial officers.

According to the first Indian Express report, election commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu had noted that neither he nor his fellow election commissioner Vivek Joshi nor the CEO of West Bengal had any idea who had authorised over 16 lakh appeals, mostly automated, to be filed on behalf of the ECI.

The institutional architecture of India’s parliamentary democracy, the doctrine of separation of powers and the system of checks and balances that have been central to the survival of democracy in post-colonial India, are facing their gravest test.

The Supreme Court, which could and should have restrained the ECI, virtually gave it a free hand to perpetrate this monumental electoral fraud. Had it not been shelved, the 6 October meeting between the joint parliamentary committee examining the 'One Nation, One Election' Bills and the Supreme Court would have been another glaring instance of the blurring of legislative-judicial boundaries.

With the rot having set in at the institutional level, the survival of democracy now depends almost entirely on the political maturity and alertness of the people of India.

The 30 September meeting of the INDIA bloc and the growing assertion of Left student activists, Gen Z protesters, progressive citizens, alternative media activists and the non-NDA opposition parties signals the hope of a determined democratic turnaround. Will we be able to break the fascist stranglehold? Don’t watch this space: watch the streets instead.

Dipankar Bhattacharya is the general-secretary of the CPI-ML (Liberation). More of his writing here