Listen to Rahul Gandhi. Fake voters should appall you, whichever party you support

The Print

2 days ago

What has Gandhi shown? He has simply pointed out that 1,00,250 of around six lakh voters in Bengaluru's Mahadevapura assembly constituency are bogus, and alleged that this helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win the seat in a close contest. And there are five categories of bogus voter: duplicate voters, voters with fake addresses, bulk voters in a single address, invalid or missing photos, and a large collection of geriatric 'first-time voters'.
But oddly, when the revelations come from Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, the supposed guardian of India's electoral democracy has responded with passive-aggression and shaky legalese. It has offered fact-checks that check no facts, demanded oaths, and done everything possible to avoid confronting the problem.
If any other citizen were to approach the Election Commission with compelling evidence that a decisive chunk of voters in an assembly constituency are fake, it would prompt instant action.
Whether you support Congress, the BJP, or any other party, this should appall you. It certainly calls for investigation, rather than gaslighting. Our Election Commissioners seem unable to comprehend the simple fact that they are accountable to the people of India.
The fact that the BJP — which has spent years yammering about illegal immigrants on the voting rolls — has rushed to the ECI's defence says it all.
Also Read: ECI's voter verification drive in Bihar is tailor-made to keep Dalits, Muslims, EBCs out
A pattern of evasion
This isn't the first time the ECI has reacted to Opposition demands as if it were an arm of the ruling party. Recall its continuous refusal to provide machine-readable voter rolls to political parties despite no less than four written requests by the Congress party. As a result, it took the Congress six months to go through several seven-foot stacks of physical voter rolls to identify bogus voters in just one Vidhan Sabha constituency.
Despite a High Court order last December — a month after the Maharashtra election — to share videography and CCTV footage of voting in a polling station, the ECI colluded with the Modi government, which amended the 1961 Conduct of Election Rules, restricting access to footage. It then announced that these records would be destroyed 45 days after an election, which means evidence that could have identified bogus voting was deliberately destroyed by the ECI.
These are the actions that prompted Rahul Gandhi's op-ed Match-fixing Maharashtra.
The right-wing/establishment chorus trying to brazen out these revelations, or justify the corruption of electoral rolls, should listen to how they sound. They have claimed that the Mahadevapura revelations justify the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the kind that the INDIA alliance is opposing in Bihar. This is wilfully missing the point.
INDIA has opposed the hasty manner in which the Bihar SIR was sprung at the last minute with zero notice or consultation with any party. Its poor timing (in peak migration season) and the fact that the list of documents to prove eligibility initially excluded IDs that the poor are most likely to possess made it unacceptable.
INDIA has no faith that this ECI will undertake a clean-up exercise with transparency and in good faith — and indeed, its recent actions have only confirmed this suspicion.
Also Read: Can ECI demand oath from Rahul Gandhi on 'vote chori' allegations? Here's what the law says
The roll embodies democracy itself
Those who reduce electoral integrity to 'my side versus your side' are undermining the very basis of the Indian Union. This country adopted a universal adult franchise in 1947. In an unequal, hierarchical society, 'one person one vote' was revolutionary. The electoral roll embodies the ideas of democracy and representation. 'The roll created an all-India identity of all Indians as equal voters; as 'WE, THE PEOPLE',' writes historian Ornit Shani.
An attack on the integrity of the roll is an attack on the Constitution and the people. For the poor and powerless, the vote is their one chance to make themselves heard, to have a say in their own lives and that of their country. If that all-important act of voting, for which they line up in heat and rain, is revealed to be a choreographed sham, it is the biggest betrayal imaginable.
Democracy is a system in which warring ideologies and interests periodically wage electoral battle, and the loser accepts the winner's triumph in return for a fair chance to try again in five years. Trust in the electoral system is vital and sacrosanct for this to work. If that trust visibly degrades, the other side cannot be expected to abide by fraudulent rules. As it is, the proportion of people who trust the ECI 'to a great extent' has almost halved from 2019 to 2024. And anyone seeking to undermine democracy should remember that 60 per cent > 40 per cent.
If it has any concept of public duty left, the Election Commission is duty-bound to cooperate with the Opposition and the majority of Indians it represents.
Amitabh Dubey is a Congress member. He tweets @dubeyamitabh. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)