Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: political capture

  • Time for proof is now, Mr. Gandhi

    Rahul Gandhi is free to voice himself but on the question of the Election Commission “stealing votes”, as he has been claiming to the press, he needs to offer the proof he claims he has right away. By repeatedly claiming the Commission has been “stealing votes” for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), most recently on August 2 and before that on August 1, as well as that his Congress party has proof of this alleged theft yet never actually turning up that proof whether to the Commission or to the courts, Gandhi is acting in bad faith. The effects of his words are likely to keep suspicion of the Commission’s conduct alive even when they may not actually be warranted and to sow in the public sphere doubts about the terms on which the BJP is winning elections.

    If the Commission and/or the BJP are really cheating, as Gandhi is implying, duty demands that he and his fellow party members immediately place evidence of that in the public domain, endeavour to stamp out the menace, and agitate for restitutive action.

    On August 2, Gandhi said:

    “Prime Minister of India is Prime Minister with a very slim majority. If 10-15 seats were rigged, it would have been possible. Although our suspicion is closer to 70, 80, 100 seats. We are going to prove to you in the coming few days how that Lok Sabha election can be rigged and was rigged.”

    And on August 1:

    “I want to say that the persons in the EC doing this — right from the top to the bottom — we won’t spare. You are working against India and this is treason. Not matter where you are, retired or otherwise, we will find you.” … 

    He claimed his party had suspicions of irregularities in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly election in 2023 and in the Lok Sabha election last year, and this went further in Maharashtra.

    “We believe that vote theft has happened at the State level (in Maharashtra). Voter revision had happened and one crore voters were added. Then we went into detail, and with the EC not helping, decided to dig deep into this. We got our own investigation done, it took six months and what we found is an atom bomb. When it explodes, the EC would have no place to hide anywhere in the country,” he added.

    On the same day, Gandhi also said his party would reveal what evidence it has of “outrageous rigging of voter rolls” by the Election Commission of Karnataka on August 5. Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal also said party members would organise a protest in Bengaluru on the same day. But considering the party has claimed to have evidence of electoral fraud in other State elections as well, the reasons for revealing the evidence as it pertains to Karnataka alone are hard to fathom.

    Importantly, such evidence should be conclusive rather than founded on opinion and speculation. This means, for example, dispositive proof of collusion supported by official documents containing the relevant statements. Only evidence of this nature would constitute an “open and shut case” — which Gandhi has said he possesses — in a courtroom, which is the only place where the Commission’s guilt, such as it is, can be determined.

    In July 2025, in the context of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, Gandhi and opposition parties alleged that the exercise was aimed at “disenfranchising voters” ahead of the Bihar Assembly elections and accused the Commission and the BJP of seeking to “steal votes”. He also claimed the Commission had been caught “red-handed” stealing votes during this exercise.

    Perhaps Gandhi’s first public, high-profile accusation was made at a press conference in February 2025, when he said that the Commission had overlooked substantial voter list inflation in Maharashtra, a surplus of 1.6 million relative to the most recent Census figures (2011), and that more voters had been added to the lists in the five months between the Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly polls than in the preceding five years. He also claimed that this discrepancy had been engineered to favour the BJP and called for a formal investigation. However, The Hindu’s data team was able to analyse Election Commission data to check at least the second of Gandhi’s claims and found that it wasn’t unusual:

    The spurt in electors in Maharashtra became a subject of controversy after the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, raised the issue at a recent press conference. In Maharashtra, between the Lok Sabha polls held on April 19, 2024, and the Assembly elections held on November 20, 2024 — a period of 215 days — there was a net addition of 39.6 lakh electors.

    However, between the Assembly elections on October 21, 2019, and the Lok Sabha polls in April 2024 — a period of 1,642 days — there was a net addition of only 32.2 lakh electors. “Why did the Election Commission add more voters in Maharashtra in five months than it did in five years,” Mr. Gandhi asked.

    Data show that the net addition of 39.6 lakh electors in 215 days is not unusually high. Between the Lok Sabha polls on April 20, 2004, and the Assembly elections on October 13, 2004 — a period of 176 days — there was a net addition of 29.5 lakh electors. A similar analysis of 2009, 2014, and 2019 shows net additions of 30 lakh, 27.2 lakh, and 11.6 lakh electors, respectively.

    In fact, if the increases are expressed as electors added per day, the context becomes clearer. The net addition of 39.6 lakh electors in 215 days amounts to 18,434 net electors added per day. This figure is not a far cry from the 16,782 net electors added per day in the 176 days in 2004. A similar analysis for 2009 and 2014 shows that 16,746 and 14,519 net electors were added per day, respectively.

    Last year, Gandhi, along with Congress members and opposition parties, had alleged large-scale manipulation of voter rolls during the Lok Sabha elections, suggesting the Election Commission was actively aiding the BJP in disenfranchising opposition voters. These accusations continued into 2025.

    In almost all these instances, the Election Commission has refuted the allegations and denied that it has been engaged in electoral fraud. However, this democratic institution has lost its independent character over the last few years due to its preferential treatment of the BJP, including when preparing election timetables and sanctioning BJP leaders for breaches of the Model Code of Conduct. The BJP has compounded this impression for its part by modifying the process by which Election Commissioners are appointed to magnify the prime minister’s input and by appointing former Commissioners in cushy government positions shortly after their term at the helm has ended. The Commission’s denials thus don’t hold much water.

    In fact, its increasingly diminished reputation lends a soft credence to Gandhi’s claims — i.e. that they are not all implausible — and that is precisely why the evidence needs to be available to all electors right away. Otherwise, Gandhi risks injuring his own reputation, and, more importantly, that will only undermine public resistance to the BJP’s efforts to completely ‘capture’ the Election Commission.

    The threats to reveal the alleged fraud are further enfeebled by claims that the Commission’s electronic voting machines (EVMs) are illicitly recording more votes for BJP candidates, an allegation that the Congress and other parties have raised vis-à-vis both Assembly and Parliamentary elections. The problems with the claims here are slightly different, and two pronged. First, the alleged mechanism by which EVMs reapportion votes for BJP candidates remain thwartable by the processes the Election Commission has been following, that too with the satisfied participation of representatives from all political parties. Second, not all the technical steps in the process by which the Commission verifies the integrity of its EVMs are interference-proof, however. Yet the Commission has steadfastly refused to submit its devices to independent verification, with the occasional support of a higher court that has failed to appreciate all the methods available to perform these checks without compromising the devices in any way.

    Against the backdrop of both allegations — voter-list inflation and EVM-rigging — it is possible Gandhi’s posturing is a form of deterrence, a signal to the BJP that its actions are not passing unwatched, and an attempt to build a Panopticon of public scrutiny of how the Election Commission conducts itself. Yet this can be done without also sowing doubt and while keeping the focus on transparency and propriety, which in fact the democracy has demonstrably lost. In fact, I hope Gandhi isn’t striking the poses he is because these losses are harder to build public support around than “vote theft”.

  • Enfeebling the Indian space programme

    There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.

    Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.

    The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)

    On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.

    At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.

    For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.

    It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.

    Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.

    Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.

    But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.

    Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.