[pmarc] "Parliament should discuss preventing electoral deforms, not bringing reforms", The Indian Express, 9 December 2025
yogend...@swarajindia.org
Parliament should discuss preventing electoral deforms, not bringing reforms
Yogendra Yadav
You are talking about desh, kaal and patra.” This was my colleague Vijay Mahajan, also a national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. We share a penchant for naming things. It’s just that he is smarter, more conceptual. As he was that day in Patna when I was struggling to show a pattern across three forthcoming subversions of our electoral system: Delimitation, One Nation, One Election and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. He helped me to see their interconnection: These three would tilt the desh, kaal and patra of elections to the enduring advantage of the BJP.
I recalled that conversation as I read about the proposed debate on “electoral reforms”, due Tuesday in the Lok Sabha and in the Rajya Sabha Wednesday. Electoral reform, a lovely old expression that recalls an era of innocence, where we thought parliamentarians could be persuaded, shamed or coerced into changing the very rules that brought them to power. Much dirty water has flown down the Yamuna since.
From the wide-eyed days of debating a change in the electoral system from first-past-the-post to proportional representation, through an excited period of trying legal remedies for the ills of money and criminality in politics, we are now scraping the bottom of the kadhai: How to protect the bare minimum of electoral integrity, how to ensure the final vote count reflects the way people voted. Parliament should not be discussing electoral “reforms”. It should be concerned with how to prevent electoral “deforms” being imposed by the present regime.
It’s not just India. There is a global trend of authoritarian regimes twisting the rules of the electoral game to their advantage. Unlike 20th-century dictators, autocrats in the 21st century need to show they enjoy the people’s backing. They cannot do away with elections altogether. And they cannot risk losing. So they resort to two simple tricks: Capture the institution that manages elections and tweak the electoral rules in a way that tilts the ground in favour of the rulers, while retaining a semblance of political competition. Contemporary Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Kenya, Thailand and Myanmar offer examples of what students of comparative politics conceptualise as “abusive constitutionalism”, “autocratic legalism” or “electoral tilting”. The name of the game is to use constitutional, legal and institutional mechanisms to create an uneven playing ground. Tarunabh Khaitan’s paper, ‘Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts’, shows how incremental changes in law and institutions have produced a party-state fusion in India.
Let us use a fiction to extend this analysis to desh, kaal, patra. Let us imagine someone sitting in the BJP office watched the 2024 election outcome with horror. He identified three chinks in the BJP’s armour: Desh — there are some regions in the southeastern coastal belt that resist the BJP; kaal — the electoral calendar puts the BJP’s hegemony to the test every year or so; and patra — some sections of the bottom of India’s social pyramid distrust the BJP even when they vote for it. Let us imagine the design solution he might come up with to tackle these problems. The combination of delimitation, ONOE and SIR comes eerily close to that solution. These seemingly unrelated moves fit into a perfect whole.
Delimitation serves two purposes for the BJP. The reapportionment of Lok Sabha seats as per the population share in the 2026 Census could ensure that regions where the BJP does not do well are cut down in parliamentary clout and lose their veto power on constitutional amendments. A hidden hand would ensure that almost all states where the BJP is relatively weak (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal, Punjab) would lose seats and all the big gainers (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan) are BJP strongholds. And all this following a seemingly perfect democratic principle and the letter of the Constitution. Delimitation would also open up the possibility of gerrymandering, redrawing constituency boundaries to suit the BJP. This American virus, so far unknown in India, has been lab-tested in Assam and J&K and is now ready for full-scale implementation that could easily tilt a dozen or so Lok Sabha seats towards the BJP.
One Nation, One Election also serves a dual function. Simultaneous elections are known to amplify the advantage for the incumbent. In the Indian context, holding national and state elections together would give the dominant national party a small but critical additional swing in the assembly elections. Above all, once-in-five-years elections would make it that much easier for the incumbent party at the Centre to manage and manipulate the mega event. Elections are already a sporadic democratic exercise in an otherwise undemocratic rule; ONOE would reduce this episode to a singular moment, more amenable to capture.
The SIR closes the loop in this story by denying voting rights to individuals and communities inconvenient to the BJP. Going by Bihar’s example (net reduction of 44 lakh names from the pre-SIR list), the nationwide SIR is headed for upwards of 5 crore deletions in the voters’ list, the biggest disenfranchisement in the global history of democracy. This helps the BJP through structural and targeted exclusions. The shifting of the onus of enrolment onto voters would lead to a disproportionate exclusion of the most marginal sections — the poor, migrants, nomads etc. — where the BJP enjoys relatively lower margins, if any. The BJP, with its organisational presence and local officials’ support, is better placed than the Opposition to rescue its loyal voters from exclusion. Besides, the design of the SIR and its implementation bias would lead to a targeted disenfranchisement of Muslims and other communities the BJP finds electorally inconvenient.
Would this triple whammy lead to a further fall in India’s democratic rating? International IDEA, an inter-governmental organisation, has already identified India as a case study of “democratic backsliding”. Its Global State of Democracy notes that over the last five years, India has registered a statistically significant decline on many indicators, including “credible elections”. Let us hope that over the next year, International IDEA might like to monitor India, especially under the leadership of the new (rotational) chair of its governing board — who else but our very own Gyanesh Kumar, the Chief Election Commissioner of India.
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