EC Confession With Smoke And Mirrors

The sudden rush by the Election Commission of India (ECI) to initiate a Special Summary Revision (SSR) following the chaotic electoral cycles in states like Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Haryana—which unfolded in the wake of the draconian Special Intensive Revision (SIR) announced on October 27, 2025—is nothing more than a rear-guard action after the face of politics in the country was significantly altered through this stratagem. It smacks of a desperate attempt to deflect legitimate, piercing attacks on the innate illegality of its earlier actions and to throw a smokescreen designed to evade judicial and public scrutiny. Far from a routine administrative clean-up, the SSR is a screaming admission of institutional lapses, shoddy groundwork, and the profound venality of keeping rightful citizens out of voter lists. The damage inflicted by the SIR has been catastrophic, cutting off crores of voters from the democratic process. The resort to the SSR now is a cynical manoeuvre to paper over those deep scars. This systemic failure and political disenfranchisement reflect a staggering level of venality, driven by several core reasons.

First, the deliberate shifting of the burden of proof onto long-standing citizens turned constitutional rights into insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles. Striking millions off the rolls without a robust, transparent localised warning was an intentional act of attrition against vulnerable demographics. Second, the arbitrary and weaponised deployment of "dead, shifted, or absent" classifications by overworked or compromised Booth Level Officers reveals institutional callousness. Third, the timing of the SIR rollouts right before crucial state elections in Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Haryana exposed a design to structurally alter elector profiles rather than purify rolls. It engineered confusion and voter suppression when participation should have been maximised. Displaced citizens were forced to scramble through arduous re-enrolment channels, while elections were imminent or freshly concluded. It was nothing but a deliberate obstruction of democratic franchise.

Let us not take our eyes away from the sheer scale of the purge, affecting upwards of 13 crore voters. It was surely more than a mere administrative glitch and a sure sign of calculated disenfranchisement. To treat millions of citizens as collateral damage is a betrayal of the Election Commission’s foundational constitutional mandate. We are told voters are being added long after the elections are over. The SSR comes along precisely when the public outcry has become politically untenable. That the ECI now retreats to an SSR framework to manage the fallout is a straightforward indictment of its leadership, a self-goal scored willy-nilly, as it were. This fiasco reflects squarely on the Chief Election Commissioner and his mollycoddlers. There is now enough out in the open to suggest that if anything, at the very least, the CEC has been spectacularly inept. So why keep him warming his seat? And will this shabby self-exposure shield the coming elections from the depredations caused by the SIR?