Independence Day is a reminder to ask the questions EC isn’t answering

In 2025, the media favours market-friendly stories over probing power, sidelining urgent questions on electoral democracy.

WrittenBy:Kalpana Sharma
Date:
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As the week leading up to India’s 79th Independence Day dawned, the condition of stray dogs in the country’s national capital made the top headlines following a ruling by the Supreme Court. While the fact of the highest court in the land addressing this issue is certainly unusual, one can question whether the story merited the page one lead in some English language newspapers.

Also, was it more important than the growing clamour by Opposition parties about discrepancies in voters’ lists? All Opposition members in Parliament staged a protest on August 11 as they marched to the office of the Election Commission but were stopped from proceeding by the Delhi police. Surely, in the context of India’s democracy and on the eve of its Independence Day, this merited more attention.

In many ways, this juxtaposition of two stories, one relating to the future of stray dogs in New Delhi, and the other relating to the future of electoral democracy in India, reflects media priorities in India of 2025.  The former will appeal to the “market” to which the media caters. The latter, if pursued and highlighted by mainstream media is likely to draw the ire of the party in power and be viewed as being pro-Opposition. 

 The issue of discrepancies in voters’ list became a topic for discussion after the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, held a press conference on August 7 presenting a detailed survey of one parliamentary constituency, Mahadevapura in Bengaluru. 

Since Rahul Gandhi’s press conference, several independent platforms and a couple of mainstream channels have followed up. But overall, national newspapers have stuck to reporting the “claims” made by Rahul Gandhi and the various protests but not done their own follow-up investigations.

The investigation by a team in the Congress suggested, based on the official data of the Election Commission, that in that one constituency questions could be raised about over 1 lakh registered voters. The voters list of Mahadevapura included duplicate votes, that is one person with more than one voter ID, unverifiable addresses, many voters registered at a single address (such as a brewery), voter IDs without photos, and voters registered as new voters who were older than the norm for such registrations.

Some newspapers took the investigation seriously enough to make an editorial comment.  The most nuanced of these was in The Hindu. Even as it acknowledged the importance of Rahul Gandhi’s presentation, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about electoral outcomes from these revelations without sufficient proof. At the same time, it emphasised that the Election Commission needed to respond to the revelations rather than casting aspersions on the motives of the person, or the party, that had done this. The editorial concluded:

“The ECI must embrace the principle that democratic institutions grow stronger through scrutiny. The alternative — continued erosion of confidence in electoral processes — poses far greater risks to democratic governance than any specific allegation of malpractice.”

The Indian Express, on the other hand, a newspaper that had done an excellent investigation into the way the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was being conducted in Bihar, chose to focus on Rahul Gandhi, calling the campaign of “Vote Chori” (vote theft) “self-serving and fraught”. Only in the last paragraph did it mildly criticise the EC for its “peeved responses”. 

Since Rahul Gandhi’s press conference, several independent platforms and a couple of mainstream channels have followed up. But overall, national newspapers have stuck to reporting the “claims” made by Rahul Gandhi and the various protests but not done their own follow-up investigations.

Meanwhile, even without the resources available to the big media houses, independent media journalists have been working and digging out information that suggests that the problem exposed in Mahadevapura is far more widespread. It calls for serious questioning of how an independent, constitutional body like the Election Commission updates voters’ lists.

On this issue, one of the first to raise the alarm was The News Minute which reported as far back as November 2022 how a non-governmental organisation called Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Institute claimed it had authorisation to collect information from voters to update voters’ lists in Bengaluru.

The story is worth revisiting now in the light of the discussion on voters’ lists as it suggests that there could have been other such interventions that were not detected or challenged and therefore not reported.

Also, in this last week, while little appeared in national newspapers, AltNews was already putting out information that mirrored some of what the Congress’s investigation revealed. For instance, it found from the official EC data that six duplicate voter ID cards were issued to the same person, Sushama Gupta from the same constituency, Palghar in Maharashtra.

A Newslaundry investigation of three Lok Sabha seats earlier this year had pointed to gaps in the way revisions were made and verified. In Bihar, a report on Kaupa village in Bihar’s Rohtas constituency revealed that several voters, listed as living in the same house, aged between 26 and 28 years, had either their own name, or the name of their father or husband as just a full stop. How has this happened when the state is going through an intensive revision of electoral rolls, and this information was gathered from the draft revised list published by the EC?

Also read this detailed investigation by the Reporters’ Collective. It found that more than 1,000 new voters registered in Valmikinagar in Bihar following the revision of electoral votes were also registered as voters in Uttar Pradesh. According to the report: “For more than 1,000 cases, we found perfect matches: Names of the voter, their ages and their listed relatives (a mandatory field in the ECI database) were exactly the same across the databases of the two states. Only, their addresses were different.”

Apart from the discrepancies in voters’ lists, in the last few years, attention has been drawn to a mismatch between votes polled and votes counted after an election. One of the first to expose this was independent journalist Poonam Agarwal, who noticed this in a constituency in Madhya Pradesh in 2018. Since then, she has persisted with the story, right up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. 

In an interview to Article-14, she describes the hurdles she has faced to expose the discrepancies between the votes polled and the votes counted after an election. She says:

“When I first started working on stories about a mismatch between votes polled and votes counted, I asked the EC questions about this mismatch. Rather than answering my questions, they removed the data from their website. I found the EC’s response very odd—not normal at all. Earlier, politicians across party lines had a sense of trust in the Election Commission and believed that whatever it did, it did with full transparency. But since 2019, and especially after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, there has been growing distrust of the EC among both politicians and the public.”

It is evident from the reports that have already appeared, that the expose by the Congress, irrespective of its claims that this represents stolen votes, is a big story, one that is worth pursuing by the media.

If the EC had addressed these queries and discrepancies, it is possible that the story would have died down. But when an independent body like the Election Commission stonewalls, or prevents data from being accessed, or refuses to publish data (such as the list of the 65 lakh voters who have been held ineligible in Bihar following the SIR), we must ask why? Did it not know that there were such discrepancies? If not, why not? Did it know but chose to ignore them? If so, why? Or is there another reason?

These are perfectly legitimate questions that voters, and the media, should ask of the EC and what better time than when we are celebrating and talking about freedom and independence. 


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