Shikha Mukerjee | Amidst SIR Row, Rahul’s Haryana Expose Jolts EC

The Election Commission, established as an independent body under the Constitution to conduct free, transparent and ideally flawless elections, operates a “system” that is replete with errors and wholly complicit in hiding flaws. Its functionaries serve up the weakest excuses when its systems are exposed as inefficient.

Asked about the magnitude of errors found in electoral rolls in Dhakola village of Haryana’s Ambala district last week, booth level officer Arvind Aggarwal said: “Only previous officials can explain how this mistake happened.” However, the EC, under its current chief, Gyanesh Kumar, doesn’t have the luxury of dodging responsibility. He declared himself a new broom that will usher in a new era. Alas, the past mistakes left uncorrected were discovered and the onus is on him.

Institutions, unfortunately, can’t argue that “previous officials can explain how this mistake happened”. Institutions like the EC have histories, precedents and continuing responsibilities. After spending thousands of crores of rupees on making the “system” work, it must own up for its mistakes.

A national newspaper was following up on Rahul Gandhi’s momentous revelations that in Haryana’s Dhakola, the same woman’s photograph appears on the voters list over 223 times. A report found it was an understatement; her photo appears 255 times against different names in two booths in the village.

Charanjeet Kaur knows the voters list is replete with mistakes; her reaction was: “Whenever I go to vote, the election staff, policemen on duty and polling agents all laugh.” But this is not a laughing matter for the EC, the Haryana government and everyone who, from all accounts, knew what was wrong, but failed to revise the voters’ list.

There was a moment in the history of elections in India when Mamata Banerjee, then in the Congress, marched to Kolkata’s Writers’ Buildings to evict the government of Jyoti Basu as she doubted the legitimacy of the election that was widely suspected of being “scientifically rigged”. Though the Basu government survived, the electoral rolls and proof of voter identity changed forever. Instead of just names and addresses, voters were enrolled with photographs and the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC). This is what the EC has succeeded in subverting; putting a name, a face and an address together.

That a single person’s face appears on the rolls 255 times, as the news report said, or 223 as Rahul Gandhi claims, is a scandal. It goes to the heart of the links between democracy and elections. It reveals that governance in India, at the EC and in states, is dysfunctional. Does it matter that the data Rahul Gandhi dug up was from the electoral rolls used in the 2024 Haryana polls? It does not. It doesn’t matter that he went on a “Vote Adhikar Yatra”, trekking across Bihar in the company of Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD, Dipankar Bhattacharya of the CPI(M-L) and others, to tell voters that the EC was involved, even as he accused the ruling BJP-JDU coalition led by Nitish Kumar of “Vote Chori” through the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.

The connection between the Haryana expose to the election in Bihar after the SIR’s completion is simple. If electoral rolls in 2024 were as full of errors in Haryana, what is the credibility of the SIR process in 2025 meant to produce “pure electoral rolls to strengthen democracy”? That, however, is a later question. The first question that must be answered by Gyanesh Kumar and the EC is what was going on for “at least a decade”. A newspaper tracked 17 individuals who cast their votes based on electoral rolls where the same face appears in 255/223 places. These voters said they has voted, because they had successfully convinced the presiding officer that their vote was legitimate and the electoral roll was rotten with errors.

A system as flawed as this is not likely to be different in the 27 other states of India. The pan-India SIR now underway in 12 states/UTs, including poll-bound West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, are all engaged in cleaning up flawed electoral rolls. The principal flaw in the rolls, the EC claims, is the enrolment of “illegal migrants”.

After Rahul Gandhi’s revelations, independently confirmed by the news media, the EC must explain who is “ineligible” and why. It can no longer plug the narrative that illegal migrants have been illegally issued various documents like Aadhaar, EPIC and ration cards to naturalise Bangladeshis or Rohingyas, thereby subtracting the vote share of Hindus. The EC must also explain what it meant by its excuse in March this year, when it declared “irrespective of the EPIC, any elector can cast a vote only at their designated polling station in the constituency where they are enrolled and nowhere else”. How then were 17 individuals in Dhakola village allowed to vote, when Charanjeet Kaur’s photograph appeared 255 or 223 times in the voter list?

The EC’s “chalta hai” attitude is obvious. In Dhakola village, Jyoti Ram and his daughter-in-law Roma Devi voted in the 2024 Haryana polls because “the election agents know us, so we don’t face much trouble casting our votes despite Charanjeet Kaur’s photograph appearing next to our names”, and added: “Even for poll staffers, it’s challenging to raise objections when nearly 250 voters share the same issue.”

Why should voters in West Bengal have to prove anything, even citizenship? If election agents are authorised to allow voters with mismatched IDs to vote, why does India spend money on CCTV cameras inside polling booths? An election process that is flawed and remained flawed over a decade, or maybe longer, cannot challenge the legitimacy of a voter just because the EC has now decided it could produce “pure electoral rolls”.

The EC’s credibility has been completely busted. In March it said: “To allay apprehensions, the commission has decided to ensure allotment of unique EPIC numbers to registered electors. Any case of duplicate EPIC number will be rectified by allotting a unique EPIC number.” Media investigations found that the EC deactivated the deduplication software “designed to identify duplicate and photo-similar entries in the electoral rolls”. The software, news reports said, were not used after 2022, when three crore duplicate/wrong entries were found. What is really going on in the name of “pure electoral rolls”? Money is squandered, the result is suspect and the politics of hunting down and disinfecting India of illegal Muslim migrants is on, with one exception — poll-bound Assam, where chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is a one-man Bengali-speaking Bangladeshi disinfecting machine, with the full support of the party to which he belongs, the BJP.