India's Election Commission Divisions Raise Scrutiny Over Voter Roll Integrity

Shaken faith: Why are India's elections under unprecedented scrutiny?

India has long held up its elections as evidence of its democratic credentials. Now their legitimacy is under question like never before. New Delhi, India – Indian democracy has been shaken by new revelations showing divisions within the body that is in charge of conducting its elections over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people.

India's Election Commission, a supposedly autonomous constitutional body, is tasked with administering elections in the world's largest democracy, and in recent decades, had won admirers across the globe for its success in conducting a voting process unmatched in scale and complexity. But an investigation by The Indian Express newspaper reported that the current chief of the commission frequently overruled concerns raised by his two other equally ranked commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database.

These revelations come after a months-long struggle by India's opposition parties to bring what they have described as the "sabotaging" conduct of the election commission to the fore, which they say is dictated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party for its electoral benefit. For decades, India has grappled with deep inequality; divisions along caste, religious and ethnic lines; and the growing role of money in its elections. Yet through it all, the actual conduct of its elections was largely viewed as "free" domestically and by global monitors.

But leading opposition leaders have, in recent months and years, for the first time, questioned whether elections can be trusted and whether votes are counted accurately, as well as whether rights decide who gets to be a voter or if those in authority take the decision arbitrarily. Those concerns, say analysts, are likely to only be amplified by the latest revelations.

"Today, that faith [in the election process] has shaken. It is very shocking for the nation," SY Quraishi, who headed India's election commission between 2010 and 2012, told Al Jazeera. "The Election Commission used to be a very reputed institution. Now, it is totally dysfunctional – and that's an understatement."

So, what does this mean for India and its democracy? What are the latest revelations about India's Election Commission? Earlier this week, the Indian Express newspaper published a series of stories, based on internal documents and interviews, laying bare divisions within the poll panel – consisting of three commissioners, Gyanesh Kumar, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, and Vivek Joshi. Kumar is the commission's chief.

Indian law requires the commission to decide by a majority. Reports revealed that Sandhu and Joshi resisted and questioned the legality of measures Kumar took unilaterally. Since June last year, the commission has been revising and updating the voters list state-wise. It has struck off more than 13 million names during the exercise since then, which the critics say targeted economically weaker sections, minorities, and other vulnerable groups of Indian society disproportionately.

Opposition parties took the matter to the country's top court, which largely signed off on the process to decide on who gets to vote in India. For India's more than 1.4 billion population, a voting right does not end merely on ballots – rather, several government welfare schemes are tied to voting rights. Now, reports reveal that some of the strongest resistance to the three-member commission's decisions was coming from within.

In fact, Sandhu and Joshi formally objected on record at least 14 times over the last 10 months to measures issued by circumventing them. Sandhu called it "unauthorised and illegal". Those objections related to the new voter registration mandate; deletion and restoration of voters in the rolls; appeals by people against deletions; and the security of the list.

In short, every step taken by the commission sits at the center of a fierce debate. The opposition claims these additions and deletions are designed to disenfranchise specific groups of voters while boosting Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Election Commission insists its voter list is tightly secured and decentralized. Their argument holds that even in the most remote corners of the nation, a local officer makes the final call on who stays on or goes off the rolls.

New details suggest this might not be the full story. Reports indicate the commission relies heavily on ECINet, a digital platform tracking nearly a billion voters. This system has shifted power toward centralization, granting New Delhi greater control over editing instructions rather than leaving decisions with local officials. One incident highlighted by a newspaper showed how easily things went wrong in Goa. Officials there flagged almost one hundred voters who were removed by mistake. Access to make these edits was restricted strictly to New Delhi.

Goa's chief electoral officer tried to fix the error but faced a wall of silence. He sent eight emails to officials in the capital within a single week before the deadline expired. No response came through, and those voters were knocked off the list. Why does revising this list cause such uproar? The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), as the process is formally called, places an unusually heavy burden on current voters to prove they belong there.

This drive forces people to dig up old records like birth certificates, land deeds, and education diplomas. It disproportionately hurts poorer citizens, migrants, and marginalized Indians by effectively drawing lines around who gets to vote in India. A minor mismatch, such as a simple spelling error in decades-old documents, can result in being struck from the voters list entirely. Opposition parties and civil society groups warn that mass deletions could significantly alter the electorate right before elections.

In some places, reports say the exercise disenfranchises minorities, including Muslims. Al Jazeera earlier reported that the process removed 9 million residents from electoral rolls just days before state elections in April and May in West Bengal. Nearly 34 percent of those deleted voters were Muslims in a state where they make up only 27 percent of the population. Afterward, Prime Minister Modi's Hindu-majoritarian BJP secured power for the first time in that politically critical region.

The BJP and supporters say the goal is fundamentally to remove illegal migrants, the deceased, or fraudulent voters from the rolls. They try to portray many Muslims eliminated from lists in border states as "illegal Bangladeshi migrants," despite hard evidence showing Indian nationals have been victims of the process. Yet, as the exercise expands to other parts of the country, these claims increasingly embarrass even their proponents.

In New Delhi, notices were served to India's Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and his wife, alongside other high-profile politicians, judges, and senior bureaucrats. Several former Indian ambassadors serving in countries across the world received notices proving they are Indian citizens, even though they acted as sovereign representatives for years. All of this has turned political opposition into broad-based, nationwide skepticism about a lack of transparency in the Election Commission's software.

The process of matching voters against decades-old electoral rolls raises serious questions. So do the criteria used to flag individuals as having "logical discrepancies." "The [revision of voters' list] fundamentally inverts India's model of electoral democracy," said Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia programme at the Washington, DC-based nonpartisan think tank The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Since the adoption of the Constitution, India has assumed the burden of ensuring that the last man or woman is registered to vote," he added.

Vaishnav pointed out a stark contrast between India and other democracies like the United States, which have often erected barriers to voting. "India historically adopted an unusually activist approach to voter registration," he told Al Jazeera. Yet, the recent revision threatens to flip that principle entirely on its head. "It is now the voter who must prove his or her entitlement to remain on the electoral rolls," Vaishnav said regarding how the update has been executed.

Quraishi, a former election commissioner of India, shared this concern with Al Jazeera. He stated clearly that he opposes the policies introduced under the revision. "I hope [these revelations] are a wake-up call and serious action will be undertaken, including at the Supreme Court, the central government, and the Parliament," Quraishi said. The reputation of the Election Commission has gone into the dumps, making it very difficult to restore trust now. "We need efforts to rebuild faith in the system."

What exactly is the opposition demanding? Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party, accused the Election Commission of treason against the nation. He promised that its leaders would face trial if his party returns to power. Meanwhile, India's popular Gen-Z pressure group, the Cockroach Janta Party, which led a protest movement resulting in the ouster of the education minister in July, has threatened to return to the streets by Saturday if Kumar, the commission's sitting chief, does not resign. The group also wants an overhaul of how the next election commissioner is selected.

The election commission responded in a statement, saying the investigation report drew on differing views and deliberations among its three commissioners rather than official protests. Sambit Patra, a spokesman for Prime Minister Modi's party, told reporters that any division within the body was actually a sign of healthy democracy. But none of this seems to be cutting ice in a nation where far too many people now face losing their vote through an opaque process. "Our elections are fundamentally broken," Gandhi said at a news conference in New Delhi on Thursday. He added that the sacred belief in elections is evaporating.

Gandhi directed his arguments at Modi, arguing that while a leader's popularity can be understood, one must explain how anti-incumbency disappears. "It doesn't exist in North Korea. There is no democracy where anti-incumbency doesn't work," Gandhi said. He questioned Modi's re-election first in 2019 and then again in 2024, noting a much-reduced mandate even though there is no firm evidence of widespread voter manipulation helping Modi win those elections. "We have found answers."

What does this mean for Indian polity? Asim Ali, a political analyst in New Delhi, said the Indian republic stands at a dangerous moment where we could see a breakdown of the republic. "We have reached a situation where every opposition party feels that the democratic guardrails have been destroyed," Ali told Al Jazeera. He added that the allegations stem from worry that independent institutions like the Election Commission and Supreme Court have become co-opted. This political cleavage has created extreme polarization in India. "Politics has assumed a kind of existential stakes, where we have unrestrained politics of friend vs enemy," he said.

Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst and senior journalist who has covered the Indian government for several decades, told Al Jazeera that impartiality is paramount for the Election Commission. "The fact is that Caesar's wife should be above suspicion," he said.

Kidwai stated that while India has endured hard moments, including a state emergency, the Election Commission has never faced such a level of compromise. He told Al Jazeera that Modi's party mocks opposition worries about free and fair elections by labeling them sore losers. The outcomes of a match matter little, but at least the umpire should play fair.

Vaishnav from the Carnegie Endowment think tank says recent major criticisms focus on what happens between election cycles. Critics highlighted how basic freedoms erode while an uneven rule of law takes hold and power concentrates in the executive branch. Yet most observers argued that when the electoral spotlight shines, India's democracy stays remarkably robust and competitive.

Now the conduct of the Election Commission calls this distinction into serious question.