Tavleen Singh writes: Democracy at work or disaster

There have been doubts about this SIR for months, as there have been about the integrity of the election process itself.

6 min readSep 27, 2026 06:30 AM IST First published on: Sep 27, 2026 at 06:30 AM IST

In times of trouble, the worst thing a government can do is respond with arrogance and disdain. Narendra Modi is among the most skilled and sophisticated political leaders I have ever met, but this is one lesson he appears not to have learned. So, when this newspaper published its excellent investigation into the Election Commission last week, his response was to deploy his most articulate spokesmen onto TV chat shows and social media platforms to fight back hard. They did, but in the stupidest, most arrogant way.

With smug expressions and fake smiles pasted on their faces, they repeated, ad nauseum, that serious disagreements among the three election commissioners were a sign that India was a ‘vibrant democracy’. A puzzling and farcical viewpoint. But afterwards, the ones who are always too clever by half changed tactics and as usual, blamed the Congress Party. They recounted how many times election commissioners had been controlled by the government in Congress times. Names such as Naveen Chawla and MS Gill were brought up to prove this. One was a family friend of the Gandhis, and the other had been rewarded with a seat in the Rajya Sabha and made a minister after he retired from the Election Commission. True.

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It is also true that elections in Kashmir were openly rigged for decades. But does that justify what has been done now, in the name of the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, to give it the acronym that has gained a notoriety that strikes dread in the hearts of those whose election credentials it seeks to ‘revise’? Shashi Tharoor wrote a detailed and disturbing piece in this newspaper last week, so I am not going to go into the numbers of voters who have been deleted wrongly. What I learned from it was that half the Delhi voters had been deleted. And in West Bengal nearly all those who had appealed against being deleted had found their voting rights restored after appealing to tribunals, but by then the election was over.

There have been doubts about this SIR for months, as there have been about the integrity of the election process itself. Rahul Gandhi has led the charge and in Bihar tried to make ‘vote chori’ the fulcrum of his campaign. I have been among those who doubted the charges because I continue to believe that no matter how much tampering happens, and it does, it usually does not change the result of an election. Besides, if you have been in journalism for as long as I have, it is hard to forget how bad things used to be. Especially in rural India.

I remember ballot boxes being stolen by mafioso-types. I remember lower caste voters being forced to vote with a gun pointed at them by rural thugs. One reason so many criminals ended up in Parliament and our legislative assemblies is because these mafias discovered that if they could win elections for others, they might as well start winning for themselves. In the process, they discovered that there was more money to be made from ‘serving the people’ than from crime. Indian democracy has been deeply damaged because of this.

So, what happens now that Gyanesh Kumar has become the villain of a very ugly story? If I were him (thankfully I am not), I would gracefully exit the stage after declaring with a pained expression on my face that I have done no wrong but am happy to resign until a commission of inquiry establishes my innocence. Who knows, but he may have done this by the time you read this piece — which would be good for him. But the damage done to the Modi government still needs repair.

It needs to prove to the Indian people that it has not been trying to steal elections by disqualifying voters who do not vote BJP and by conducting an SIR that now has a huge cloud hanging over it. Instead of ordering its supporters and social media trolls to bang on about toolkits and foreign money, it should spend some time introspecting about why so many things are starting to go so wrong. Why is Modi these days appearing to be constantly misreading the political mood? When the Cockroach Janta Party descended on Jantar Mantar, there was such mishandling that shooting at students with pellet guns became more important than paper leaks. Then came the disastrous handling of Modi’s birthday celebrations. The acres of ‘diyas of blessing’ that were lit brought shame to the birthday boy when small children were seen collecting oil from diyas to take home for their families.

The latest mishandling has been the way his government responded to The Indian Express story. BJP spokesmen were seen openly defending Gyanesh Kumar on TV and social media without anyone noticing that, in doing this, they were proving the opposition parties’ charge that the Election Commission had become a tool of the government. With so many things going so wrong, the Prime Minister needs to conduct a special intensive revision of his team if he wants to regain a measure of lost credibility. And if he has not already asked Gyanesh Kumar to make a graceful exit, he would do well to do so because he has become a major liability for the government. Besides, it can be said with certainty that he has lost the trust of voters.