Rohit Kumar
NEW DELHI, July 3: Accusing the Election Commission of India of having failed to conduct the elections impartially and the BJP-ruled Center of having misused the central investigating agencies against the opposition parties, the INDIA Bloc leaders have jointly written a letter to the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant expressing concern over the state of democracy in the country.
The letter signed by the leaders of 24 Opposition parties, said they were taking the unusual step of reaching out to the CJI because they believed that “democracy is in jeopardy.”
The letter dated June 28 but was released to the media on Friday, detailed concerns over the SIR exercise in West Bengal and Bihar. The leaders also made a direct accusation, alleging that they believed the elections conducted in Delhi, Haryana, and Maharashtra had been “manipulated”. The leaders said they were approaching the court because they believed democratic institutions were under strain and that electoral outcomes in several instances did not accurately reflect the will of the people.
Delineating the EC’s conduct from 2014 onwards, the Opposition parties said there were hardly any instances, barring a few exceptions, when questions were raised about the integrity of persons in the Commission before 2014. “But since 2014, almost every appointment made by the government has been of persons closely associated with it and seen to be doing the bidding of the government, brazenly, to manipulate the outcome of election. results,” the letter said.
The Opposition leaders alleged that the Election Commission’s independence had eroded in recent years. Referring to the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Anoop Baranwal case, they argued that judicial concerns about the process of appointing Election Commissioners remained relevant. The letter criticized changes made through subsequent legislation, which removed the Chief Justice of India from the committee responsible for appointing the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s “brazenly biased conduct”, coupled with his “open, unabashed support of the BJP during the course of and in the outcome of electoral processes”, was a matter of grave concern, the Opposition said in its letter. They accused the EC of not being “even-handed” in the application of the Model Code of Conduct ahead of elections, “by choosing not to take action when the Model Code of Conduct is breached by the political party in power — all this while targeting those in the Opposition.”
The parties also questioned the rationale behind conducting the SIR. The political rhetoric surrounding the exercise, the Opposition claimed, centered on the alleged infiltration of Bangladeshis into the Bihar electoral rolls. “Now that the Bihar Assembly elections are over, there is absolutely no data to suggest that such an infiltration indeed took place, nor has the Election Commission made public any data with respect to the number of Bangladeshis having illegally acquired the right to vote in India,” the letter noted.
The situation became worse in West Bengal, where, the Opposition said, the government was under siege with the presence of 2.4 lakh CAPF personnel. “To put this in context, 3.5 lakh CAPF personnel were deployed for the entire Lok Sabha election in 2024,” the letter pointed out. The letter also complained of the arbitrary removal of voters under a “never used before category” and of logical discrepancies that had led to the exclusion of nearly 25 lakh voters.
“We believe that recently conducted elections in Delhi, Haryana and Maharashtra were also manipulated,” the letter said.
The Opposition has demanded the immediate suspension of the SIR, arguing that such a comprehensive overhaul of the electoral rolls should be undertaken only when the next Assembly election is at least five years away. This, they said, would allow Commission representatives to verify voters through door-to-door visits rather than through a documentation-based process that had never been adopted in the past.
“When all else fails, people still repose their trust in the judiciary. So when the judiciary fails to respond, it indicates a complete breakdown of the Republic,” the letter said. Electoral democracy in our country faces the gravest of threats from the Modi-Shah regime, it said.
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