The story of India began with the Preamble to the Constitution. It has now become interior decor, a quaint heritage to hang on the wall. But in times of doubt, it focuses the turbulent mind and tells us exactly who’s who and what’s what. It is a document written by and for the people, who “hereby adopt, enact and give to ourselves this Constitution”. No other entity belongs in its remit. There’s no prime minister or president, no election commissioner, no judge, administrator or police officer. These functionaries are subsidiaries created later in the Constitution, instruments by which the people are to secure the Preamble’s objectives of justice, equality, liberty and fraternity. They are public and civil servants, which is what they used to call themselves.
Today, this balance of power seems to have been upturned amidst the uproar about the Chief Election Commissioner and ‘stolen’ elections. It’s a constitutional crisis, because the powerless no longer retain the one instrument of power guaranteed by the Constitution: the vote. If the election watchdog has turned predator and robbed the weak of the right to choose, the latter may as well not exist, and the Constitution is a fantasy for them.
Calls to cancel elections presided over by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar underscore this constitutional crisis. The Cockroach Janta Party has taken the traditional position: hold off on future elections until electoral rolls are restored. Earlier, former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had gone further, seeking repolls. But is that even sufficient restoration, without rolling back the actions of governments that may not have a mandate?
A rollback would take India into terra incognita. But India is beyond the pale already, because the founding fathers had not anticipated the enormity of millions of voters being summarily disenfranchised. Indian elections were made inclusive by the first chief election commissioner, Sukumar Sen, who had only excluded women voters who would not reveal their real names to strangers like polling officers, due to cultural niceties. The ECI used to pride itself on setting up polling centres for a handful of voters in sparsely populated regions amid forbidding terrain―and even for one voter, a baba in the Gir forest, whose only neighbours were Asiatic lions. Now, under Gyanesh Kumar, elections have become exclusivist, and the onus is on voters to prove their authenticity. A rollback, an undoing of what was ill-done, seems to be a moral imperative. And that is the constitutional crisis, too, because the nation's operating manual does not say how to achieve it.
The land of rollbacks is uncharted territory. Here be monsters, and they are already in our midst―in the form of cockroaches who give the whole establishment the willies by challenging the politics of obscurantism with blunt realism, rejecting the WhatsApp wisdom of their parents, and bringing common-sense decency back to politics. In its hurry to climb down, the ECI has done away with the additional information it sought in Form 6 from new voters―which must have excluded many first-time Gen Z voters who could decide the 2029 general elections. Gen Z is now free to vote, but what of the millions excluded in prior elections by Form 6 black magic?
A rollback would be imperfect and incomplete, but in response to an unprecedented crisis, that is no deterrent. The directives of state governments which won office under the aegis of Gyanesh Kumar should be rolled back pending elections, to cancel their effect on the people. Beyond laws and rules, what of the cultural forces that influence the behaviour of communities? West Bengal’s history texts will be politically redacted, and every school textbook must begin with a hagiography of Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder S P Mookerjee. The worldview of the state’s children will change. Rectifying all this takes more than fresh elections.
Rollbacks are anathema to business (remember Pranab Mukherjee’s retrospective tax on Vodafone?), but in politics and society, there is no reconciliation without reversal. In September, the Gauhati High Court ordered compensation to a woman who was pushed into Bangladesh without due process. Money alone is not enough; the administration that cancelled her should apologise to restore the status quo ante. Compensation is the only possible reaction to acts of god, but damage from the acts of government should be rolled back.
There is now a BJP government in Delhi because AAP leaders Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia were incarcerated on trumped-up charges and could neither run their government nor campaign effectively for the 2025 election. Should that election not be rolled back, along with the administrative actions which followed? What about the many politicians and parties, across states, whose fortunes have been altered―and the people’s will subverted— by the relentless application of saam daam dand bhed? The list of corrigible errors is vast.
The thread of electoral malfeasance can be traced back to a change in the law for selecting the CEC in 2023-24, by which the election commissioners were no longer to be selected by the PM, the Leader of Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. The CJI was replaced by a cabinet minister chosen by the PM. That permanently tilted the odds 2:1. Gyanesh Kumar is the first CEC to be appointed thus—and hopefully the last. Imagine rolling back that diddle, which has changed the face of the country. Too much? Or have Indians been too forgiving and failed to honour the Preamble?
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
(Views are personal)
