[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Election Commission tried to shake off its image as a puppet of Narendra Modi’s BJP by holding a press conference yesterday, but by the end of it, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar only reaffirmed that prevailing impression: that he is the errand boy of Modi & Company.
It was good optics that the Election Commission held a press conference at last; since June 24 this year, the day the Election Commission issued a notification about a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, the opposition parties had been making persistent demands for the Commission to clear the air on several issues.
How could the EC embark on such a major exercise, being held after 22 years, without taking into confidence all the stakeholders in the electoral process, everyone concerned about India’s democracy had been asking. The chorus of the demand to come clean had come from many former chief election commissioners and election commissioners as well.
But Gyanesh Kumar & Co. had refused to face either the media or the opposition parties as they were unsure of being able to defend their illegal exercise in a face-to-face interaction. It was only after the Supreme Court’s decisive intervention — the SC did not declare the SIR exercise illegal but acceded to the demands of the political parties and activists and directed the EC to publish the names of voters deleted from the electoral rolls after the revision and state the reasons thereof in a machine-readable and searchable format; it also mandated that Aadhaar would be considered an eligible document for voter registration — that the EC found no reason to hide behind closed doors.
Lies, Double Standards, and Silence
Yes, the EC held the press conference yesterday but resorted to lies to fob off the charges: Gyanesh Kumar continued to insist, as he had been doing in his tweets, that Rahul Gandhi needed to make the charges, if any, under oath as per law; that is a blatant lie. Former CEC OP Rawat and several retired officials of the Commission have categorically stated that the stipulation of the ‘complaint under oath’ applied only when the electoral rolls were being prepared, while Rahul Gandhi was making the charge of irregularities after the elections were over.
See the double standard of Gyanesh Kumar: Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition, is dared to make the charges of malpractices in an assembly election in Bangalore under oath or apologise to the nation, but the same is not demanded from Anurag Thakur, a ruling BJP MP, even as he claimed that electoral fraud was committed in Raebareli and Wayanad during the last Lok Sabha election!
The EC has been speaking with a forked tongue because we have spineless men occupying the highest office to conduct the elections. They have refused to answer how the number of voters in Maharashtra increased by 8% within five months, between the Lok Sabha elections in May 2024 and the assembly election in October last year. Why can’t both the lists be given to political parties, as demanded by them? Because these election commissioners have a lot to hide.
When accusing fingers are being raised about their integrity day after day, if they had truth on their side, Gyanesh Kumar & Co. would have dragged Rahul Gandhi to court for spreading falsehood, but they are afraid to do so because in a court case, their shenanigans as errand boys of Narendra Modi would unravel.
