The Election Commission of India’s press note on Saturday is not accountability, it is damage control after being caught.
When two sitting Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, have to put on record 14 objections to the manner in which the Commission is run under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, it reveals a Commission that has ceased to function as a constitutional body.
The concessions now offered – that agenda will be circulated before meetings and minutes shared afterwards, that foreign trips will need approval – are basic administrative norms.
That they had to be demanded shows how completely the ECI has been centralised and controlled.
More damning is what the press note quietly admits about the Special Intensive Revision. Electoral Registration Officers will now launch a special drive to enrol anyone whose name has got left out. This is an admission that the SIR has been a colossal exercise in disenfranchisement.
This is part of a larger pattern of how the BJP government is using every central agency to hold on to power. The Enforcement Directorate and CBI are deployed months before every election to raid opposition leaders, jail them, force defections and engineer splits.
The Income Tax Department freezes opposition party accounts. And the Election Commission is now used to do on the electoral roll what ED and CBI do in politics – delete, disqualify and demoralise those who will not vote for the ruling party.
The project is particularly anti-minority, and its sharpest edge is against tribals and Christians.
For tribals, the SIR imposes a documentary test that Adivasi communities in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and the Northeast simply cannot meet, despite living on the land for generations.
The same government that calls them encroachers on their own forests then hands those forests to corporates. Their votes are deleted in the name of revision, their land alienated in the name of development.
The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act has been weaponised to choke Christian institutions that run schools, hospitals and tribal welfare programmes. Licences of thousands of Christian NGOs, dioceses, missionary hospitals and educational societies have been cancelled or kept pending, bank accounts frozen, and raids conducted to brand service as conversion.
Throughout the country pastors and believers are harassed, prayers disrupted and anti-conversion laws used to criminalise faith, while the Centre looks away or encourages it.
The message is clear – if you serve tribals and minorities, you will be defunded and delisted.
India’s institutions have largely held except in dark periods like the Emergency when an emboldened executive ran roughshod over the Constitution and a permissive judiciary legitimised it through ADM Jabalpur.
The ECI under Kumar has repeated that history, getting away with the SIR because the Supreme Court declined for months to decide its constitutionality. When it finally ruled on May 27, the purge was already a settled fact in Bihar, Bengal and Phase 2 states.
The judgment engaged with SIR in theory, not in practice, reading a provision for exceptional, targeted revision as a licence for a state-wide sweep and brushing aside its own 1995 ruling that every deletion must be individually reasoned.
