As somersaults go, the Election Commission of India (ECI), under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, has managed quite a few in recent times. It’s a survival skill seasoned bureaucrats employ when their backs are against the wall. Until the Supreme Court’s verdict on the controversial special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, the judiciary had largely seemed to accommodate the poll panel. That latitude may be running out. The court has twice taken issue with the Commission’s selective interpretation of its Bihar SIR verdict. It has outright rejected the ECI’s claim that the judgement validated adding a contested declaration to Form 6, the application used to enrol voters. The court could deliver another blow when it resumes hearing the matter after examining ECI files to determine whether the Chief Election Commissioner made key decisions unilaterally.
That is when Nirvachan Bhavan’s U-turns began. The latest in the series is a special summary revision of electoral rolls in 17 states and Union territories where the SIR is already over. It opens the door to enrolling afresh about 13 crore voters purged during the SIR exercise. No citizenship hassle, no algorithmic tyranny of logical discrepancies; the process would be back to pre-SIR normalcy. There is more. If the poll body blocked demands for machine-readable poll rolls from political parties over the past few years, claiming it would compromise voter privacy, it has now volunteered to provide them in that format at both the draft and final stages, but without electors’ photos. The PDF files previously shared with political parties contained photographs but were not machine-readable.
Other about-turns include circulating the agenda of the Commission’s meetings in advance and publishing minutes of the interactions for transparency, as the Reserve Bank of India does with the minutes of its Monetary Policy Committee’s rate-setting meetings. The ECI can do more. For example, it should consider including photographs in machine-readable electoral rolls, since matching images with names can help flag duplicate entries.
It should also publish a searchable log of every addition to or deletion from the rolls and disclose the full findings of the external vetting of ECINET, its national electoral-roll repository. Media reports suggest intentional blocking of ECINET access to update the voter list during the SIR process. Nothing short of full glasnost will do.