IN KING LEAR, an old king, tired of governing, divides his kingdom among his daughters and holds one thing back: “Only we shall retain / The name, and all th’ addition to a king”. The rule, the revenue and the business of running the realm go to others. He will keep the title and the ceremony, and he will no longer have to watch. The tragedy does not begin with the storm or with his daughters’ cruelty. It begins there, with a sovereign’s decision to stop looking.
Only one man, Earl of Kent, at court sees where this leads. He tells the king to his face that he is making a mistake: “Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad”. When Lear orders him out of his sight, Kent answers with the three words the play rests on- “See better, Lear”. He is banished for it, and leaves saying, “Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here”.
In a republic, the sovereign is not a king. The Constitution names the sovereign in its first words, ‘We, the People of India’. We keep the name, and all the additions. The work of keeping the electoral roll, the list that decides which of us gets to be sovereign at all, we entrusted to the Election Commission. That was right; a sovereign must delegate. The danger begins, as it did for Lear, when the sovereign decides that having delegated, it need no longer look.
On 23 September, The Indian Express published what I can only describe as Kent’s speech. Ritika Chopra’s investigation reports that two of the Election Commission’s three members, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, objected in writing at least fourteen times in ten months to decisions taken in the Commission’s name. Since the report, the Commission has responded that such observations are part of ordinary institutional deliberation and that its final decisions over the past year, including on the SIR, were ‘unanimous’.
Were the objections really just notings files or were those addressed to somebody? I would argue that the objections are addressed to us, the sovereign. What they are saying, fourteen times over, is: see better.
Whose Commission is it?
Article 324 of the Constitution places the superintendence, direction and control of the electoral rolls in ‘the Election Commission’, not in its chairman. When the Narasimha Rao government had had enough of T.N. Seshan, they made the Commission a three-member body in 1993. Seshan argued that the new commissioners could advise him but not outvote him. In 1995 a Constitution Bench disagreed, upholding the majority rule as a guard against concentrating power over elections in one person. Section 18 of the 2023 Act keeps that rule, which is unanimity where possible, and the majority where members differ.
Put simply, the Chief Election Commissioner is first among equals and nothing more. He presides over the Commission, but he does not own it. He has no veto and no casting vote, and he has no authority to speak in the Commission’s name when the Commission has not spoken. When two of its three members say a decision was never theirs, the law does not treat it as the Commission’s decision, whatever letterhead it was issued on.
What did the two commissioners tell us?
The first objection concerns the Commission’s own voice. On 16 April, Sandhu reportedly told senior officers that many communications were going out in the Commission’s name without its approval, which he said was not permitted.
The second is Form 6, the application a citizen files to be entered on the roll. It is prescribed by Rules the Central Government makes under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and while the Commission is consulted on the matter, it cannot itself amend the statutory form. The Supreme Court has separately recognized that the Commission retains a degree of residual authority to formulate an appropriate documentation framework for SIR. Yet an additional declaration which appeared in the online Form 6 workflow asking first-time applicants whether they, a parent or a grandparent appeared in the roll of the last intensive revision, some two decades ago can be seen as an amendment to Rules which the Commission (let along one of the members of it) did not have the power to. Joshi warned in May that this required amending the Rules, but it was done anyway. On 13 August, Sandhu recorded that it was “unauthorised and illegal”.
The third objection concerns West Bengal, where about 91 lakh names came off the roll and judicial officers restored many of them. Then 16.10 lakh appeals were filed to strike the same voters off again. An appeal of this kind is not a clerical step. It asks a forum to take away a citizen’s vote after a judicial officer has found that she is entitled to it. If it is filed in the Commission’s name, it is the Commission itself setting out to disenfranchise that citizen. A decision of that weight, repeated sixteen lakh times, is the very definition of an institutional decision: it must be taken by the Commission, on record, and on identifiable material. It cannot simply happen. Yet in August, Sandhu asked who had authorized these appeals on the Commission’s behalf, and who had filed them. Neither he, nor Joshi, nor the state’s Chief Electoral Officer had been told.
The fourth is about where the roll lives, and it is the objection I find most troubling. The law makes the Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), subject to the Commission’s superintendence, direction and control, responsible for preparing and revising each constituency’s roll; in February the Supreme Court said claims and objections are ordinarily to be adjudicated through a quasi-judicial process by EROs. There are more than four thousand of them, each answerable for one constituency, each open to appeal. That dispersal is itself a safeguard. To alter the roll at scale, one would need thousands of officers to do something wrong, and somewhere among them, someone would refuse. Joshi warned of a gradual centralization of the roll database, with state officers lacking full access to ERONet, and proposed an audit of who holds credentials to alter it. Centralization reverses that arithmetic. When the roll lives on a single system, the number of people needed to change it shrinks from thousands of accountable officers to the handful who hold the keys.
Consider a file that the law says only the Prime Minister may sign. The Prime Minister is ready to sign it, but another officer has locked it in a cupboard and kept the key. No one has overruled the Prime Minister, and no order has been passed; the file simply cannot be reached. If a technical directorate in Nirvachan Sadan can decide how much of the roll an ERO may see or correct, that is the ERO’s position today. Goa shows what it means for a voter. EROs there found 97 flagged voters eligible, but the software had no way to restore them before the final roll was published. Nobody decided that those 97 citizens should lose their vote. The system decided for them, and a system cannot be cross-examined.
Finally, Joshi and Sandhu separately wrote to the Cabinet Secretary about a reallocation of work that reduced their oversight of the digital systems holding the rolls. The gravity of that step is easy to miss. The Election Commission is built to stand apart from the executive, and a constitutional body does not ordinarily carry its internal disagreements to the government’s senior-most civil servant. For two Election Commissioners to do so is to record that they could not secure, within the Commission itself, supervision of the very machinery on which the roll now lives. And what was taken from them was not ceremonial work. It was an oversight of the system that decides whose name stays. You go outside the building when you have run out of ways to be heard inside it.
What are we governed by?
The Commission says all its final decisions were unanimous. Apply that to Form 6. If the change was never the Commission’s decision and was not covered by a valid allocation of business, it was made in its name without authority. If it was a final decision of the full Commission, the unanswered question is what happened between the two Commissioners’ written objections and that later unanimity. The files should settle that. But however they settle it, a prior question remains: whether the Commission could have done this at all. Even a unanimous Commission cannot amend a form that the Rules prescribe. Unanimity may cure a defect of procedure; it cannot supply a power the law never gave.
John Adams wanted a government of laws and not of men. Read together, the objections describe two different failures. Form 6 is a failure of rules: a statutory form altered in practice without the procedure the law prescribes for altering it. ERONet is a failure of custody: a central system in which whoever holds the credentials holds, in practice, the power to include or exclude, and in which an officer’s lawful order counts for nothing if the software has no way to carry it out. Put the two together and you arrive at the government by ‘login’. If a declaration about one’s ancestors can be added to an online workflow without the statutory form being amended, and a statutory officer’s decision can be defeated by a missing rollback, what else may be added, or withheld, in the same way?
Who falls off the roll?
Most of us who read op-eds will never have to trace ourselves, a parent or a grandparent, to a roll from twenty years ago. The people for whom that exercise is hardest are the first-time voter whose parents never enrolled, the migrant worker counted in a village a thousand kilometres away, the woman whose family’s record sits in her natal village, and the household that never kept papers because nothing in its life required them. These are not edge cases in India. They are a large share of the people the Constitution calls sovereign.
The design carries a bias of its own. A name incorrectly left on the roll is visible and someone can object to it, and it makes a good speech. A name incorrectly removed is silence in which democracy dies. The voter may find out only at the polling booth, and the state bears no cost for the error. Exclusion at scale does not need anyone to intend it; it only needs nobody to prevent it.
“What need one?”
Later in the play, Lear’s daughters reduce his hundred knights by apparently reasonable increments. Fifty. Twenty-five. Ten. Five. “What need one?” Regan finally asks. Lear’s answer is desperate: “O, reason not the need!” The safeguards the two commissioners defended are going the same way, each loss too small to notice for a sovereign who has stopped looking. Ambedkar warned the Constituent Assembly that democracy in India was only a top-dressing on an essentially undemocratic soil. Top-dressing is not lost in a single storm. It thins one season at a time.
Will we see better?
What should follow? Accountability for those who presided over these matters, if only for the precedent it sets for whoever sits in that chair next. But the chair is only part of it; the system around it must be repaired too. The knights must be returned. The fourteen objections and the Commission’s replies should be published. Nothing requiring the Commission’s approval should issue in its name without a recorded Commission decision or a valid allocation of business. The online Form 6 declaration should come off unless and until its legal basis and Commission authorization are made clear; if it alters the statutory Form 6, the Rules should be amended. The Commission should say who filed the 16.10 lakh West Bengal appeals and, if any were filed on its behalf, who authorized them, and the audit Joshi proposed should be carried out independently. The Supreme Court, already hearing the SIR matters, should call for these files.
Those are demands on institutions. The harder demand is on ourselves. The Commission holds the roll under trust, and in a trust the ‘settlor’ is not a supplicant. We can insist that it be kept, and the smallest act of that insistence is to check that your name is still on the roll. Then check your mother’s. Then ask, as plainly as Sandhu asked in the Commission’s own files, who authorized this and who carried it out.
Kent stays with Lear to the end, in disguise, serving the king who banished him. In the final scene, when Lear enters carrying Cordelia’s body, Kent asks, “Is this the promised end?” Edgar answers with another question: “Or image of that horror?”
Everything in that last scene was set in motion in the first, when the sovereign would not hear the man telling him to see better. Two Commissioners have now said, in substance and repeatedly: see better. The question is not whether we accept every one of their objections. It is whether the sovereign (you and I) is willing to look.
