CEC 'exposed', rot 'diagnosed': Do Rahul, INDIA Bloc have a remedy for ‘rigged’ polls?

Citing reports published by The Indian Express about Kumar overriding concerns persistently raised by Election Commissioners SS Sandhu and Vivek Joshi’s on various aspects of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) over the past 10 months, the Opposition is considering submitting fresh notices in both Houses of Parliament seeking the CEC’s removal from office.

Opposition outrage

On Thursday (September 24), as the Opposition pressed its demand for the CEC’s “immediate resignation”, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra submitted a complaint at Delhi’s Parliament Street police station demanding registration of an FIR against Kumar for “conspiring to remove eligible electors (from voter rolls), falsifying a public register and issuing communications in the name of the Commission without its authority.”

Later in the day, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) too waded into the growing controversy by setting a 48-hour deadline for Kumar's resignation, threatening nationwide protests if their demand wasn’t met.

Also read: ‘Gyanesh Kumar biggest anti-national’: CJP seeks CEC’s resignation, has 2 more demands https://thef

It was, however, Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi who delivered a political curveball shortly after CJP chief Abhijeet Dipke told the media that “regional forces” and leaders like AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal, DMK’s MK Stalin, Trinamool Congress’s Mamata Banerjee and the CPI(M)’s Pinarayi Vijayan, who had halted the BJP at 240 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls had all subsequently lost their chief minister’s posts through rigged polls but, curiously, made no reference to the Congress party’s sustained campaign against alleged vote theft in a string of polls it had lost to the BJP.

Rahul’s wily advice to CEC, protest calls

Rahul, who has been alleging for over three years a conspiracy between Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and the Election Commission (EC) to “capture the electoral system”, said he too wants Kumar to resign immediately. What may have surprised many, including members of the BJP, though, was the politically wily “advice” Rahul offered Kumar – to “turn approver against the conspirators” who “rigged India’s election system and destroyed democracy, which is an act of treason”.

The Congress organisation in-charge KC Venugopal has also instructed all party state units to organise protest marches to the EC offices in their respective state capitals on Friday (September 25) demanding Kumar’s “immediate arrest, his removal from office and a comprehensive, independent review of all decisions and electoral roll changes made under him”. The party’s district units have been instructed to follow up Friday’s demonstrations with protest marches to their respective District Collectorates on September 28.

Also read: Appointment dispute and internal dissent: EC faces a checks-and-balances question

Other outfits in the Opposition’s INDIA Bloc too seem to have coordinated their own protests, with various Left parties jointly declaring a weeklong nationwide protest from September 28 (the birth anniversary of Bhagat Singh) till October 2 (Gandhi Jayanti). The RJD too has asked all its district units to mobilise protests on Friday, demanding Kumar’s sacking and the scrapping of poll results for Bihar and Bengal, where elections were conducted after an SIR of electoral rolls, but also for Maharashtra, where polls were held in 2024 and the Opposition had alleged widespread tampering of electoral lists.

Demand for special Parliament session

Sources told The Federal that the Congress party has initiated discussions with its INDIA Bloc partners about submitting fresh notices in Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha seeking Kumar’s removal. The Congress was also seeking legal opinion on the matter as a similar notice submitted to Rajya Sabha Chairman CP Radhakrishnan on April 24 by 73 Opposition MPs from the House is still awaiting a ruling. The April 24 notice was, in turn, submitted after the first-ever petitions seeking the removal of a CEC for “proven misconduct” were signed and submitted by over 130 Lok Sabha MPs and over 60 Rajya Sabha MPs to their respective presiding officers a month earlier but were both rejected.

Congress sources say there is broad consensus “not only within the INDIA Bloc” but also among the Opposition coalition’s erstwhile constituents, the DMK and the AAP, in favour of seeking Kumar’s removal afresh, especially since some of the MPs who had signed the April 24 notice have since defected to the BJP. As Parliament’s Monsoon Session, adjourned sine die on August 13, is yet to be prorogued, sources in the Congress, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, the RJD and Samajwadi Party said the INDIA Bloc could “demand a sitting of Parliament to be convened at the earliest once the notices have been prepared and signed by the requisite number of MPs” so that the “necessary next steps can be initiated”.

Also read: EC SIR row: INDIA bloc gets ammunition, but Modi govt may brazen it out

The Opposition has also demanded that all dissenting views shared in writing by Sandhu and Joshi with Kumar and other poll officials on the SIR process, as revealed by The Indian Express, must be “placed on the floor of Parliament” and the Modi government must concede a “detailed discussion on the illegal functioning of the Election Commission under Kumar in light of this new evidence”.

Rahul’s sharpest barbs

The Congress believes that the latest revelations arm the Opposition with the smoking gun it needed to prove the “conspiracy between the BJP and the CEC to hijack democracy and the electoral system”. No wonder then that Rahul’s interaction with the media on Thursday was, thus far, his most blunt attack at the Modi-Shah duo and the disgraced CEC.

In what has now become a recurring feature of his interactions, Rahul gave a presentation to drive home his point about India’s democracy being “broken” to a point where it had “never been before”. The most stinging of the slides on display were those headlined “destroyers of democracy” and “deshdrohis (traitors) will be punished,” which identified as “conspirators” not just Modi, Shah and Kumar but also the BJP’s most-favoured businessman Gautam Adani, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, PK Mishra. A curious omission was another business tycoon – Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani – who, hitherto, was almost always pilloried by Rahul while attacking the Centre for its alleged crony capitalism.

Also read: Petition seeks contempt action against CEC Gyanesh Kumar, alleges violation of SC orders

“The vote is the foundation of our country… from the vote, which is supposed to be protected by the Election Commission, our Constitution gets its power; from the Constitution, our laws are made and from our laws emerge our institutions, this is a chain that defines modern India... if the vote is destroyed, then our Constitution is destroyed, and if our Constitution is destroyed, our laws are illegal, and if our laws are illegal our institutions are meaningless,” Rahul said.

Asserting that “today this chain has been broken”, Rahul said he was “100 per cent certain that Indian elections, Lok Sabha elections, 2024 elections, Vidhan Sabha elections, are all being rigged.”

EC replies, commissioners mum

The counter-offensive to Rahul’s latest broadside came from the BJP within minutes, with Rajya Sabha MP Sudhanshu Trivedi slamming the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition for “having no knowledge of history” and asserting that the EC was “functioning as per the law”.

Interestingly, while the BJP has now embarked on a spirited campaign to discredit The Indian Express reports in its quest to defend the poll panel chief, whose functioning is supposed to be autonomous and independent of the government, there has been, as yet, no direct word from Kumar himself nor from Sandhu or Joshi.

Also read: EC denies SIR dissent report; Oppn calls for CEC’s removal, arrest, fresh polls

The only official response from the EC has come by way of a statement issued on Wednesday that, intriguingly, did not deny that Sandhu and Joshi had repeatedly differed with the decisions taken by Kumar but, nonetheless, maintained that all decisions by the Commission were taken unanimously.

Does Opposition have a solution?

While the BJP, despite Trivedi’s bluster, has been visibly ill at ease with revelations about the dissent brewing within the EC, where the Opposition, and particularly Rahul, appear faltering is in explaining where exactly they hope to find a remedy to the rot they allege has set into the electoral system.

There is no denying that Rahul and his Opposition comrades have repeatedly raised serious concerns, often with claims that prima facie appear genuine, about the increasingly partisan conduct of the poll panel and the electoral pitch being queered for them by a “BJP-EC conspiracy”.

Also read: SC split on CEC appointment law: Justice Datta says EC must be seen as independent

Since the onset of the phase-wise SIR rollout, the INDIA Bloc has, with sustained unity, sought to exhaust every avenue for redressal of their grievance – from petitioning the Supreme Court, to Rahul jointly launching a Voter Adhikar Yatra in Bihar with allies RJD, CPI-ML, CPI and CPI(M), to disrupting Parliament and even seeking Kumar’s impeachment, not once but twice (and soon, possibly a third time). None of these have evidently yielded the result that the Opposition hoped for.

The BJP, in contrast, has sought to use the Opposition’s offensive as ammunition against it by constantly hammering the counter-point that the Congress and its partners do not see any wrongdoing in elections they win but cry foul when they lose.

What’s the strategy for future polls?

As such, the obvious question that confronted the Opposition in the past and continues to now is why, through participating in the polls, it chooses to consistently legitimise the very elections it believes are “rigged”. Rahul was pointedly asked at his presser how his party and the wider Opposition would engage with the electoral process if none of their demands are met, especially since crucial Assembly polls across Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur are due in just five months. There was no clear answer.

In a post on X late Thursday, the RJD’s Manoj Jha said, “if the Election Commission continues on its present course, Opposition parties may have to ask a deeply uncomfortable question: can they credibly participate in elections conducted under Mr. Gyanesh Kumar’s watch? Democracy cannot survive where the referee itself becomes the subject of contest. We are moving slowly but unmistakably towards that dangerous point”.