{"id":5817,"date":"2025-08-26T21:16:41","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T21:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/indias-election-commission-under-fire-from-opposition\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T21:16:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T21:16:41","slug":"indias-election-commission-under-fire-from-opposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/indias-election-commission-under-fire-from-opposition\/","title":{"rendered":"India\u2019s Election Commission under fire from opposition"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div class=\"field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<p>\n\tNEW DELHI: The Election Commission of India, long regarded as the impartial guardian of the world&rsquo;s largest democracy, is facing unprecedented scrutiny over its credibility and independence.<br>Opposition leaders and critics have alleged that large-scale rigging of elections is impacting the overall results of the vote.<br>The ECI has denied all charges, the first against it in India&rsquo;s history.<br>Heading the charge is the leader of the opposition in New Delhi&rsquo;s parliament, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, who previously alleged that India&rsquo;s electronic voting machines are flawed.<br>Now Gandhi has accused the ECI of refusing to share digital voter records, detailing what he said was a list of errors after his supporters spent weeks combing through vast piles of registration lists by hand.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tGandhi, 55, said his party lost dozens of seats in the 2024 parliamentary elections because of vote rigging.<br>The largest democratic exercise in human history across the country of 1.4 billion people was staggered over six weeks.<br>Gandhi claimed that the ECI manipulated voter rolls to favor Prime Minister Narendra Modi&rsquo;s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).<br>Modi, 74, won a historic third term last year but fell short of a majority.<br>The alleged rigging involved a string of tactics, according to Gandhi.<br>He said some people voted multiple times, citing bulk registrations from one dwelling and seemingly bogus addresses.<br>In a presentation to reporters on August 7, Gandhi pointed to a parliamentary constituency his party narrowly lost as an &ldquo;open and shut&rdquo; example of the alleged irregularities.<br>Over 100,000 &ldquo;fake&rdquo; votes were cast in the constituency, he said, courtesy of duplicate voters.<br>His Congress party lost the seat by just over 30,000 votes.<br>&ldquo;Our demand from the ECI is clear &mdash; be transparent and release digital voter rolls so that people and parties can audit them,&rdquo; Gandhi said.<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe ECI has called Gandhi&rsquo;s accusation &ldquo;false and misleading.&rdquo;<br>India&rsquo;s chief election commissioner said they would &ldquo;never&rdquo; back down from their constitutional duties.<br>&ldquo;Politics is being done using the Election Commission&hellip; as a tool to target India&rsquo;s voters,&rdquo; Gyanesh Kumar told a news conference this month.<br>&ldquo;The Election Commission wants to make it clear that it fearlessly stands rock-solid with all voters&hellip; without any discrimination and will continue to do so.&rdquo;<br>Kumar also said those alleging fraud either need to furnish proof under oath or apologize.<br>&ldquo;An affidavit must be submitted or an apology to the nation must be made &mdash; there is no third option.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>\n\tGandhi launched a month-long &ldquo;voter rights&rdquo; rally in the key battleground state of Bihar on August 17, receiving enthusiastic public response.<br>The allegations come ahead of elections in Bihar in October or November.<br>The opposition alleged the ECI had embarked on a &ldquo;mass disenfranchisement&rdquo; exercise, after it gave voters in the state just weeks to prove their citizenship, requiring documents that few possess in a registration revamp.<br>India&rsquo;s top court stepped in last week, allowing a biometric ID most residents possess to be accepted in Bihar&rsquo;s voter registration.<br>The &ldquo;Special Intensive Revision&rdquo; (SIR) of voter registration is set to be replicated across India.<br>Gandhi called the exercise in Bihar the &ldquo;final conspiracy.&rdquo;<br>Activists have reported finding numerous living voters declared dead by election officials, and entire families struck off draft lists.<br>Voter verification in Bihar is scheduled to be completed by September 25, with the final list released five days later.<br>&ldquo;They aim to steal the elections by adding new voters under the guise of SIR and removing existing voters,&rdquo; Gandhi said.<br>The ECI has defended the registration revision, saying it is in part to avoid &ldquo;foreign illegal immigrants&rdquo; from voting.<br>Members of Modi&rsquo;s BJP have long claimed that large numbers of undocumented Muslim migrants from neighboring Bangladesh have fraudulently entered India&rsquo;s electoral rolls.<br>Criticism mounted after the ECI replaced Bihar&rsquo;s machine-readable voter records with scanned image files that do not allow text searches.<br>Critics said the changes made detecting anomalies more time-consuming and prone to error.<br>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\n\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>                       <!-- \n                        \n\n<div id=\"POSTQUARE_WIDGET_122392\"><\/div>\n\n --><\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"internal-linking-related-contents\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/12-weeks-jail-for-school-it-support-technician-who-took-upskirt-videos-of-teachers\/\" class=\"template-1\"><span class=\"cta\">News :<\/span><span class=\"postTitle\">&lt;div&gt;12 weeks' jail for school IT support technician who took upskirt videos of teachers&lt;\/div&gt;<\/span><\/a><\/div><p><sub>India&rsquo;s Election Commission under fire from opposition<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW DELHI: The Election Commission of India, long regarded as the impartial guardian of the world&rsquo;s largest democracy, is facing unprecedented scrutiny over its credibility and independence.Opposition leaders and critics have alleged that large-scale rigging of elections is impacting the overall results of the vote.The ECI has denied all charges, the first against it in&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-wrap\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/indias-election-commission-under-fire-from-opposition\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;India\u2019s Election Commission under fire from opposition&rdquo;<\/span> &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5818,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}