When ECI lies came thick and fast

Sunday, 17 August, was a day that will live in infamy. The specially convened press conference of the Election Commission of India didn’t just lower the stature of the current chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar Gupta. Nor did it merely dent the credibility of the constitutional body he heads. And you’d be wrong to think of that sorry spectacle as a win for the Opposition or a loss for the ECI.

It was, to be brutally honest, a spectacle that can only shame proud Indians. It devalued decades of hard-earned national capital and pushed our electoral democracy towards an abyss from which it will be hard to climb back.

In an earlier life, as a professor and election analyst, I’d proudly sing the praises of India’s electoral system wherever I went. I’d say with great pride that holding free and fair elections isn’t a preserve of the wealthy West. A poor country that had broken the shackles of colonial slavery could also be a model of electoral democracy. Britain, I used to remind audiences, had once been told to learn procedures from India’s Election Commission. Even America, I’d say, had been advised to learn from India how to hold impartial elections.

In recent years, however, the very Commission whose reputation was once our pride has dragged the credibility of our democracy into the mud. And so today, writing these lines, I hang my head in shame.

Let’s recall the context of that press conference. Barely ten days earlier, Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi had gone public with allegations of voter list fraud in Maharashtra and then tabled serious evidence of electoral roll tampering in a Karnataka Assembly segment.

Questions over the ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR) of voter rolls were roiling Bihar. Opinion polls showed the ECI’s credibility at a historic low. Opposition leaders in Bihar were set to launch a ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ against the disenfranchisement the same Sunday.

And, on that very day — yes, on a Sunday, a government holiday — the Election Commission convened its press conference. To anyone familiar with the rhythms of news and media management, it was obvious: this was about stealing the Opposition’s headline.

Still, there remained a sliver of hope. Maybe, sensing the gravity of the crisis, the Commission would announce a serious inquiry to restore credibility. All media outlets were allowed in, after all, and no questions were censored. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a breakthrough. But what was said — and left unsaid — at that press conference will go down as a most shameful chapter in the annals of the Election Commission of India.

Much has already been said about the chief election commissioner’s tone and body language that day. And rightly so. His opening statement sounded less like the words of the head of a Constitutional body and more like the opening gambit of a politician. It seemed obvious the script had been drafted elsewhere.

To his credit, he didn’t descend to the level of doggerel like his predecessor Rajiv Kumar. But he did lean on cheap filmi one-liners. Instead of rising above criticism, he came across eager to wrestle his critics in the mud. Less an umpire, more a player in the match.

Even if you ignore the tone, what unfolded was bizarre, to put it mildly. Yes, journalists were free to ask questions, but so was the CEC free to duck them, to answer them obliquely or irrelevantly, if not lie outright.

Sample these:

Q. If you demanded an affidavit from Rahul Gandhi, why not from Anurag Thakur?

A. Only local voters can file objections. (Since when is Anurag Thakur a local voter in Wayanad?)

Q. If affidavits are the remedy, why was the Samajwadi Party’s affidavit ignored?

A. No such affidavit was filed. (A blatant lie.)

Q. If the rolls were defective, is the Modi government founded on tainted votes?

A. There’s a difference between being on the rolls and actually voting. Those wrongly listed didn’t vote. (If there’s a basis for this astounding claim, none was offered.)

Q. Why was there no consultation with political parties before the SIR?

No answer.

Q. Why was the Commission’s own written norm to not conduct intensive revisions in an election year violated?

A. “Should we do revisions before or after elections?” (A crude quip to dodge a charge he couldn’t sidestep.)

Q. Why rush SIR during floods and monsoons?

A. Because in 2003 it was done in the same month. (Context: In 2003, preparations began months in advance, and there were no forms or documents to be collected then.)

Reporters pressed for hard data: how many forms were filed without documents? How many did BLOs reject as ‘not recommended’ — and on what grounds? How many new names were added in June–July during this SIR exercise? How many ‘foreign infiltrators’ — who had allegedly weaseled their way into the voter rolls — did the ECI find? The answer to all these questions: pin-drop silence.

Every so often, the silence was broken by empty brags like “seven crore voters stand with the Commission”. The demand for CCTV footage of after-hours voting dismissed on the absurd pretext of protecting women’s honour! Demands for machine-readable data labelled “dangerous”. And the breathtaking lie that in every village, BLOs had held meetings with local party workers and handed them lists of the dead and permanently migrated voters.

Worse than the plain lies and the half-truths was the brazen subtext. It wasn’t articulated in so many words but hammered home nevertheless that the onus of enrolment is on the voter, not the ECI. If the rolls are faulty, the blame lies with the political parties, not the Election Commission. No matter the allegations, there will be no investigation. Want to challenge us? Try your luck. The Commission stands unmoved.

Who does it stand with? Take a wild guess.