By Malay Mishra
“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”, a quote attributed to the late American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, finds a different context, time and place with reference to the nation-wide protests against the controversial exercise of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls and its attendant threats to the continuance of constitutional democracy.
The October 10 protests were stubbornly suppressed, with barricades everywhere and police vans waiting to take peaceful protesters into preventive detention. A massive force of nearly 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel confronted barely a handful of demonstrators.
The capital turned into a ghost city around Jantar Mantar, soon to be denotified as a designated protest site. Instead, the govt allowed three other sites far away on the periphery of central Delhi to distance dissent from the centre of power. Delhi was under fire, a fire which refused to be doused. The govt’s overreach meant that it had something to hide and thus the institutional capture stood exposed.
At the same time, such actions galvanised the movement into a broad-based stream of resistance. This became evident two days later, when nearly 2.5 lakh citizens, led by the Opposition combine, marched to the Supreme Court in a “March for Democracy” rally. They submitted a petition against the ECI, demanding its restructuring and the repeal of the September 2023 law that established the current composition of the selection committee. The petition also called for the CEC’s resignation or impeachment, the countermanding of all state elections held after the SIR exercise began in June 2024, and, most importantly, an independent and impartial inquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge to examine all Commission documents since the SIR came into existence.
Since then, the government has come under mounting pressure, with nationwide demonstrations growing day by day around a common demand: the annulment of the SIR exercise and the resignation of the CEC. In all this, the role of the Congress and Leader of the Opposition in particular have been seminal. The fact that almost all Opposition parties, civil society and activist groups, students, lawyers and journalists (with the singular exception of the CJP whose leaders were held in police custody) joined the rally to the Supreme Court (SC) consolidated the movement while putting the govt more on the defensive.
The fact that the govt has not yet come up with any positive suggestion nor an alternative plan to avert the situation has left people to surmise that the present crisis could morph into a bigger force debilitating for the regime. However, there is no move yet, as observers feel, towards any regime change leading to anarchy and breakdown of the system as speculated by the ruling party.
The Congress in response has stated that regime change had always happened in India through elections and therefore the reference to a Bangladesh-like situation was farfetched. Yet protestors have all along been demanding their right to take part in the electoral process without fear of being deleted from the rolls or shortchanged through demand for irrelevant documents or even calling for historical evidence of their previous generations’ voting record.
It is heartening that the Election Commission has taken two important corrective measures of late, announcing a Special Summary Revision (SSR) of electoral rolls in 17 states and UTs to enrol new voters and second, promising to political parties readable PDF copies of the final electoral rolls for ease of verification, both demands long pressed by the opposition. It is thus apparent that following daily protests and citizens’ steadfast demands for bringing far-reaching changes in the composition of ECI and its highhanded operation, these measures have been taken to assuage the public mood.
Even the SC whose neutrality was perceived as a way of indirectly favouring the ECI had changed its stance going by its recent rulings after the march to the Court. This in itself portends a significant change with the SSR, which had not taken place since 2024, allowing 18 plus voters their due right to participate in the electoral exercise and letting political parties to freely verify electoral rolls in the forthcoming state elections. Both will be substantial brakes in the undoing of excesses by the ECI as widely reported.
With political stability as well as economic and social conditions of the country under heavy stress, frustration and anger could lead people to be more and more demanding to mitigate their existential distress and this would be hardly the time for the govt to brush things under the carpet and act so coercive on the contrary. The latest detention of some student leaders including that of the CJP to deflect the Tiranga (tricolour) March in Delhi’s Connaught Place and in other cities attest to the govt’s keenness in subduing the movement. On the flip side this could lead to a negative perception of a democratic nation, weakening its leverages in global conduct and affecting its aspirations for leadership within the Global South constellation of emerging democracies.
Analyzing Hitler’s rise to power in his critically-acclaimed book The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett describes how populist leaders play upon the gullibility of people to plan their survival at the cost of wrecking the system from within, and in the process give birth to autocracies which engender far-reaching damage to the continuity of the very system of which they are a part. This could well play out in the present context of the electoral crisis juxtaposed against democratic assertions of the people when the credibility and trust in the system is in serious attrition.
The writer is a former diplomat, educator and public intellectual.