The dramatic shift in the Haryana and Maharashtra election results between the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections held just six months apart  has raised a whole set of urgent questions about the transparency and credibility of the election process. The questions have since assumed more compelling proportions in view of the government's response and disturbing revelations about the process of electoral roll finalisation in Delhi where elections are to take place on the 5th of February. Investigative studies about the Lok Sabha elections in certain constituencies of Uttar Pradesh by credible alternative media portals Newslaundry and Scroll have also reinforced the growing complaints about the utter lack of transparency and institutional accountability in the electoral process in Modi's India. More than the Electronic Voting Machines, questions now revolve around the election machinery and mechanisms at work.

The questions that arose from Maharashtra were primarily twofold - the inexplicable surge in the electoral roll since the Lok Sabha elections and the incredible jump in the final voter turnout data compared to the provisional figures put out at the time of close of polling. And even after this, there was a pervasive mismatch between the final 'votes polled' and 'votes counted' figures. The Election Commission of India chose to ignore all these questions, occasionally offering some unconvincing procedural excuses. When the Punjab and Haryana High Court directed the Election Commission to furnish relevant documents and video and CCTV footage about a specific booth of Haryana to petitioner and Advocate Mehmood Pracha, the very next day the Modi government changed the 1961 conduct of election rules to restrict the scope of public inspection of poll-related documents. CEC Rajiv Kumar mocked the demand for public verification by saying it will take a person 3,600 years to go through the recordings from 10.5 lakh polling stations!

Reports from UP have for quite some time been alerting us about the kind of targeted anti-Muslim voter suppression happening in the state, both in the preparation of the electoral roll and on polling day, to keep Muslims away from exercising their electoral rights. Now we have detailed investigative reports from the state to give us an idea of the systematic deletion of names of voters assumed to be voting against the BJP in polling booths with a sizable presence of Muslims and other social groups like Yadavs and Jatavs. The other side of the coin is the inclusion of names of presumably fake voters with dubious and sketchy address details. The scale of such deletion and inclusion of names appears to have been significant enough to ensure narrow BJP victories at least in two Lok Sabha constituencies in UP in 2024 - Farrukhabad and Meerut.

Ahead of the Delhi elections we now have an alarming picture with the Chief Electoral Officer R Alice Vaz herself calling the rush for inclusion of new names unprecedented and stressing the need for greater scrutiny. As many as 5.1 lakh applications for inclusion of new names were received over a period of just twenty days following the publication of the draft electoral roll. The Aam Aadmi Party has put forward detailed complaints exposing the manner in which unverified objections have been filed to demand deletion of names of voters on a massive scale. In New Delhi Assembly constituency, from where Arvind Kejriwal represents AAP in the Delhi Assembly, more than ten percent new voters are being sought to be added while in a constituency like Shahdara from where AAP had secured a narrow victory in 2020 Assembly elections, thousands of voters are being subjected to wholesale deletion.

The right to vote is the cornerstone of any functional democracy. Unlike many countries where people have had to continue to wage protracted battles to secure universal adult franchise long after the adoption of a Constitution (as was the case for black voters in the United States), in India universal adult franchise has been enshrined in the Constitution right from its adoption seventy-five years ago in the culmination of the anticolonial struggle. In areas marked by strong feudal power, the oppressed castes and classes have of course had to fight hard to exercise their voting right in real life. But the spectre of disenfranchisement now facing the Muslim community and other sections of society likely to vote against the BJP-NDA camp threatens to make a complete mockery of India's electoral system. Today as the constitutional Republic of India turns seventy-five, the secular-democratic character of the republic and the fundamental democratic right of every citizen to exercise her franchise -  let alone other avenues of expressing dissent -  are both facing an existential threat. The fight for free and fair elections today is all about freeing Indian democracy from the clutches of this creeping fascist danger.