Hundreds of Indian opposition figures were briefly detained by the police in New Delhi on Monday as they tried to march on the country’s election commission, protesting what they say are repeated and calculated electoral irregularities favoring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s powerful ruling party.
Chaotic scenes of some opposition leaders trying to climb over police barricades before they were bused to police stations marked a new escalation in a fight that has been intensifying in recent years. Opposition parties have stepped up accusations of foul play as they have struggled to overcome results favoring Mr. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, including in states where they say that uncorrupted tallies should have gone strongly against the B.J.P.
The opposition, led by Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, claims the ruling party and the election commission are jointly manipulating elections through obscure additions and deletions to voter rolls.
The issue gained momentum after a sudden revision of voter rolls ahead of elections in Bihar, the eastern state of over 130 million that is expected to elect its local government in November. The election commission has cut over six million people, which Mr. Modi’s party said was to clear the rolls of “infiltrators.” But the opposition sees it as a way of disenfranchising the state’s Muslim voters and other blocs hostile to their Hindu nationalist policies.
India’s Election Commission has dismissed the opposition’s accusations as an effort to “mislead the people by claiming irregularities in the electoral rolls.”
Dharmendra Pradhan, a cabinet minister from Mr. Modi’s B.J.P., accused the opposition of “raising a mountain of lies” and creating anarchy.
“They don’t have any faith in democracy,” Mr. Pradhan said in a news conference. “If you win elections then all is well, and if you lose the election then you find all type of irregularities.”
Mr. Gandhi, who has led efforts to accuse Mr. Modi’s party of election manipulation, said his party had been trying to make sense of a pattern in recent elections where the “the mood would be one thing, the result would come out something else.”
What particularly drew their suspicion, he said in a news conference last week, was the dramatic change of fortune in back to back elections last year in crucial state of Maharashtra, where the financial hub of Mumbai is located.
The opposition parties did well in the state in the national election, where Mr. Modi managed to squeeze through for a third term with the help of coalition partners. But only months later, opposition groups were routed in an election for the state government. They pointed to a sudden increase in voter numbers.
“We asked the election commission to give us the voter list, the video recordings,” Mr. Gandhi said. “The election commission refused to.”
Mr. Gandhi said the work of voter verification is made difficult for political parties as the election commission refuses to share digital data. Instead, he said, the commission offers voter-roll information in hundreds of thousands of physical pages.
When his team narrowed in on one assembly seat in India’s south and spent six months going through the voter data, they found that more than 100,000 votes from the total of 650,000 votes cast appeared questionable, he said. He cited obvious duplicate votes, dozens of voters registered in fake addresses or to small homes that could accommodate only a few people, and voters lacking photos in their records.
Analysts and activists said the concerns over abuse of power have been amplified by a growing lack of transparency in the electoral process.
“By keeping critical information under wraps and failing to publicly justify its actions, the Election Commission of India risks eroding voter trust,” said Anjali Bhardwaj, the co-convener of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information.
In Bihar, the government’s sudden move to revise the voter rolls has faced pushback from political parties and watchdogs, many of whom are suing the government for rushing the exercise before a vote and without proper consultation.
The election commission had given the state’s nearly 80 million registered voters about one month to confirm their identities by providing a range of documents. Excluded from those documents was the most commonly used identification card in India, the Aadhaar, despite repeated encouragement from the country’s supreme court to allow its use.
Political parties and observers have questioned why the election commission removed digital files of the draft rolls it initially uploaded and replaced them with scans that aren’t easily machine readable. The election commission has told the court that it is not obligated to publish a list of the names deleted, or the reasons, but that anyone missing from the draft rolls can appeal their deletion.
Ms. Bhardwaj said change in the voter lists amounted to an average deletion of about 27,000 voters per constituency.
“In a state where most seats are won by a slender margin, this number exceeds the winning margin in two-thirds of seats in the 2020 elections,” she said. “This scale of deletions could potentially swing the electoral outcome in most assembly constituencies.”
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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