Media365
5 min readSep 30, 2026 03:22 PM IST
First published on: Sep 30, 2026 at 03:22 PM IST
I remember the morning after the Bankipur by-poll results. As a voter and as a political worker, I was disappointed. Bankipur was a seat our party had held for years, and the result went decisively against us. Yet, what struck me in the days that followed was our response. I did not hear our party blame the Election Commission of India (ECI), the voters’ list or electronic voting machines. The voters had spoken. Democracy does not promise every political worker the result he wants; it promises a process through which the voter gets to decide.
That experience has stayed with me as I hear Congress increasingly question the ECI. A mature democracy must distinguish between electoral disappointment and institutional illegitimacy. The first is an ordinary consequence of political competition. The second is a grave constitutional allegation and must be supported by evidence. Congress’s present concern about the independence of the ECI also sits uneasily with its own institutional history.
The Justice J C Shah Commission, which examined excesses during the Emergency, made severe findings concerning Navin Chawla’s conduct as a senior Delhi administrator. Yet Chawla was subsequently appointed Election Commissioner in 2005 under the Congress-led UPA government and became Chief Election Commissioner in 2009.
The post-retirement trajectories of former Election Commissioners offer another reason for institutional consistency. M S Gill, who served as CEC from 1996 to 2001, subsequently entered Parliament on a Congress ticket and served as a Union minister. T N Seshan, whose tenure transformed the public understanding of the powers of the Election Commission, later contested a Lok Sabha election as a Congress candidate. None of this, by itself, proves misconduct while they were in office. But neither can such history be erased when political parties debate the institutional independence of the Commission.
The deeper lesson comes from the Emergency. When the Allahabad High Court set aside Indira Gandhi’s election, the political response was not simply to return to the electorate. The Emergency followed; political opponents were imprisoned, civil liberties curtailed, and the normal democratic process disrupted. A party that has been central to that history carries a special responsibility when it questions the institutions through which citizens periodically exercise their sovereign choice.
This is not an argument that the ECI is beyond criticism. Far from it. Voter-list revisions, election scheduling, enforcement of the Model Code and administrative decisions should always remain open to scrutiny. The Constitution provides mechanisms for precisely that scrutiny: Representations before the Commission, judicial review and statutory remedies.
The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence recognises the extraordinary constitutional responsibility entrusted to the ECI. The recent controversy over Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls offers an important contemporary example. In its May 2026 judgment, the Supreme Court upheld the legal basis of the SIR and recognised the constitutional and statutory powers available to the ECI in relation to electoral rolls. Justice Surya Kant’s observations during the proceedings also underscored the importance of correcting discrepancies in electoral rolls.
There is also an international dimension that deserves recognition. India’s Election Commission is not an isolated domestic bureaucracy. It is part of a global community of election-management bodies. The ECI is a founding member and former chair of the Association of World Election Bodies and participates in international electoral institutions and networks. Its India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management has trained election officials from scores of countries, while international delegations have participated in India’s election-observation and Election Visitors’ programmes. International engagement is not a certificate of infallibility. But it demonstrates that India’s electoral administration has developed substantial institutional capacity.
The present legal framework for the appointment of Election Commissioners provides a formal role for the Leader of the Opposition in the selection process. This followed the Supreme Court’s intervention in Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India and Parliament’s subsequent enactment of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023. The precise architecture of the law can and should be debated, and aspects of it remain subject to judicial scrutiny. But the larger principle is important: The legitimacy of constitutional institutions is strengthened when the political Opposition has a recognised place in their architecture. That is an invitation to Congress, not an accusation against it. Participate in strengthening the institution. Challenge decisions where there is evidence. Take legitimate grievances to the Commission and the courts. But do not turn every electoral disagreement into a referendum on the legitimacy of the democratic process itself.
My party has lost elections. Some defeats have been painful. Bankipur was one of them. But the democratic response to defeat cannot always be to search for an institution to blame. Sometimes the answer is simpler and more demanding: Perhaps the voter wanted something else. I learned that lesson in Bankipur. Perhaps our political discourse needs to learn it again.
The writer is national spokesperson, BJP
