Institutional Trust

India’s Election Commission was designed to be trusted by people who lose elections as much as by those who win them. That makes the present quarrel over Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls more consequential than the increasingly theatrical politics surrounding it.

The Opposition has accused the Commission of “vote theft” and demanded Kumar’s resignation. The Commission, for its part, has defended the SIR as a lawful exercise intended to remove dead, migrated and otherwise ineligible names from electoral rolls. It has also said that the decision was taken unanimously.

The ECI is not entitled to immunity from criticism merely because elections are involved. If genuine voters were wrongly excluded, the errors must be acknowledged and corrected.

But there is also a legitimate institutional question about some judges commenting so categorically on an issue that is itself before the Supreme Court. The authority of the judicial office comes partly from restraint as cases are decided after hearing both sides and examining the evidence.

There is an irony here. India has more than five crore cases pending across its courts, many of them for years. The Supreme Court itself carries a formidable backlog. A wrongly deleted voter can, in principle, be restored to the electoral roll but a litigant who has waited years for justice cannot recover the years already lost.

Nor is access to justice entirely immune from questions of inequality. The Supreme Court can move with remarkable speed when an urgent matter commands its attention, while ordinary litigants can spend years waiting for a hearing. Regardless of bias or no, this contrast does expose a system in which urgency and access are not always distributed evenly.

Polemics apart, the larger question here is one of accountability. Critics of the Election Commission rightly ask who appoints election commissioners and whether the process sufficiently protects institutional independence. But this inevitably raises another: who appoints judges of the higher judiciary?

The present collegium system gives the judiciary an unusually large role in selecting its own successors. Parliament’s attempt to establish a National Judicial Appointments Commission was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015. Whatever one’s view of that judgment, the result is an institutional asymmetry that deserves discussion.

The Commission must answer the complaints against it. The courts must adjudicate them without fear or favour. India does not need an Election Commission that is politically popular. Nor does it need a judiciary that is politically popular. It needs both to be demonstrably accountable.

Democracy ultimately depends not merely on counting votes or delivering judgments, but on citizens believing that the institutions performing those tasks are fair. That trust cannot be demanded. It has to be earned.