Once again, ECI under fire, BJP to the rescue

Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s press conference on Thursday morning was as much theatre as indictment. With the confidence of a man convinced he has finally caught the magician’s hand in the till, the Congress leader accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of "vote chori" (theft) on an industrial scale, and protecting the "vote chors" (thieves).

He claimed to possess “100 per cent proof” that voters were being systematically deleted using software, inevitably targeting Congress support bases. For emphasis, he held up Aland in Karnataka and Rajura in Maharashtra as case studies, promising that what he has shown is just the trailer — the “hydrogen bomb” of evidence is yet to come.

In any functioning democracy, such grave charges against the body entrusted with the sanctity of elections would merit a sober, detailed rebuttal. Instead, the ECI responded with the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug: a single tweet dismissing Rahul’s allegations as “incorrect and baseless”.

If the ECI wanted to reassure voters, this was a curious way to do it. Its two-line statement read less like the considered defence of a Constitutional authority and more like the world’s laziest press release: vague, defensive, and utterly devoid of substance. No data, no explanation of safeguards, no engagement with Gandhi’s charge that deletions were being processed through software — just a curt denial, tossed into the digital ether like a student handing in blank exam sheets with the words “all answers correct” scribbled on top.

That the Commission thought this sufficient suggests one of two things: either it underestimates the seriousness of the allegations, or it is content to let others do the explaining for it. And sure enough, it was the BJP that arrived to flesh out the non-response.

If the ECI offered a whisper, the BJP offered a shout. Ravi Shankar Prasad dutifully accused Rahul Gandhi of not understanding the Constitution, all but reciting Article 326 like a schoolmaster wagging a finger. Union minister Anurag Thakur took the snarkier route, declaring that Rahul’s habit is to make wild allegations by day and apologise to the courts by night. Others lined up to accuse him of insulting India’s voters — a curious leap of logic that suggests criticising the Commission is equivalent to insulting the electorate itself.

The routine was so familiar it could have been scripted. Gandhi makes a charge; the ECI offers the most perfunctory denial possible; BJP leaders swarm the airwaves to defend not just the ECI but its chief election commissioner as though he were a party colleague under attack.

The spectacle might be comic were it not so revealing. For all the talk of autonomy, the line between the Commission and the ruling party appears ever more porous, with BJP leaders sounding more like institutional spokesmen than political actors.

What rankles most is not Gandhi’s flair for the dramatic — “hydrogen bomb” metaphors and all — but the Commission’s refusal to engage substantively with his claims. He pointed to software-driven deletions, to specific constituencies, to numerous unanswered requests for evidence, to patterns that demand forensic answers.

The ECI, had it wanted to, could have laid out exactly how voter deletions are verified, what checks exist, how the attempted deletions in Aland were flagged and stopped, and why its processes cannot be gamed. Instead, it relied on that all-purpose phrase, “baseless allegations”, and left the heavy lifting of defence to BJP leaders.

The effect, naturally, has been the opposite of reassurance. The more Ravi Shankar Prasad thunders, the more Anurag Thakur snipes, the more the suspicion grows that the ECI is less an umpire and more a twelfth man on the BJP team sheet. In a match where neutrality is the Commission’s only currency, its silence and reliance on political defenders feels like a catastrophic self-inflicted wound.

Elections in India are routinely described as the largest exercise of democratic franchise in the world, and the Election Commission is meant to be the institution that embodies that trust. Its job is not merely to run polls efficiently but to be seen as an impartial referee. By offering only a tweet in its defence and letting BJP leaders mount the barricades, the Commission has ceded that perception.

Gandhi’s critics say he is indulging in theatrics. That may be true — but it is precisely in the face of theatrics that institutions must show transparency and rigour. Instead, the ECI has left the stage to the BJP, whose bombast convinces only its own choir. For the rest of the audience, the absence of a reasoned, independent defence has only deepened the suspicion that the ECI, like so many other pillars of democracy, has been reduced to yet another party wing.

With agency inputs