Bihar’s silenced voters, India’s gagged press: The twin threats to Indian democracy

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 28, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/28/bihars-silenced-voters-indias-gagged-press-the-twin-threats-to-indian-democracy

The Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, probably expected that his August 18 press conference would settle the controversy surrounding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” charge. He was wrong. This is a story that has refused to die, notwithstanding Trump’s tariffs, or even the tragic floods in parts of India.  

In fact, it should not die as it is, by a long measure, one of the most important stories that any self-respecting media organisation needs to investigate. For it is more than evident now that the state of our electoral rolls, as exposed by the SIR in Bihar and subsequent media exposes, raises many important questions about our electoral system and our democracy.  

So far, only one mainstream newspaper, The Indian Express, has put its heft behind investigating the many lacunae in the SIR process in Bihar. More granular details have emerged from the stories done by independent platforms and journalists. 

Here are links to several important investigations carried by independent platforms, with several of them collaborating and pooling their resources. 

Journalist Ajit Anjum has assiduously followed up on people declared as dead in the list of 65 lakh people who have been struck off the electoral rolls. So has Saurabh Shukla of The Red Mike. 

The women and men declared dead are very much alive, as you will see in these reports. The common thread that runs through them is that these are poor people who are not even aware that the one right they have, to vote, has been denied to them because some official has decided they are dead. 

Others who have pursued this story include independent news platforms like Reporters’ Collective.   

While Reporters’ Collective found that an incredible 80,000 voters had been clustered together at addresses where 20 or more of them were supposed to be living in just three constituencies that they investigated, the latest report in Newslaundry goes further to show that even in places where people live separately according to their caste or religion, over 100 voters belonging to different castes and religions are shown as living in the same house.

For readers who would have missed much of the action because of the neglect of this story by mainstream media, it is worth taking the time to read these detailed reports and watch the videos. They tell us not only about the way this particular exercise is being conducted in Bihar but the reality of India, where despite boasts of “digital India” and elimination of poverty, millions of poor people do not have the proof that is demanded of them to establish that they exist.  

Interestingly, the latest story in the series in The Indian Express on SIR in Bihar tells us that out of 36 assembly constituencies in three districts, in 25 of them, the number of voters whose names have been deleted exceeds the margin by which the candidate elected won. Of these 25 seats, the governing alliance of the BJP and JD(U) won 18 seats. The story also shows through its data that women have been particularly disadvantaged. 

These stories graphically illustrate a very real problem we are facing, one that cannot be obfuscated the way the CEC attempted to do in his press conference. And as I have argued earlier, it is a legitimate story that the media, in a democracy, must pursue. 

Another development that has drawn attention to the importance of independent media is the series of cases filed against three prominent independent journalists, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire, Karan Thapar, whose weekly interview programme is widely watched, and Abhisar Sarma, a former mainstream TV anchor who now runs his own YouTube news channel. 

All three have had cases filed against them in Assam, a state governed by the BJP. And at least two of the people filing these cases are affiliated to the BJP or ABVP (read here).

This development tells us two things. One, that even if the government might dismiss these independent news platforms as being limited in their reach, it apparently is concerned about their reporting. Otherwise why bother to charge them. 

The second point this development illustrates is the strategy this government is following with impunity: label journalists who question as “anti-national”, or “urban Naxals” or “terrorists sympathiser” and then file cases against them, or even jail them as in Kashmir. 

Incidentally, Israel follows a part of the same strategy. It also labels Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives. It’s another thing that it even proceeds to eliminate them in targeted attacks. Most recently, five Palestinian journalists were killed even as they were reporting. 

There will be long-term consequences for freedom of speech, and the media, in India if this strategy being used by the government is not challenged and checked. The most persuasive argument on this has been made by retired Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan Lokur in an op-ed in The Hindu.

Justice Lokur points out that this government has weaponised a provision in the law that was supposed to have replaced the previous colonial sedition law. He suggests that Section 152 in the BNS is nothing more than sedition in “sheep’s clothing”, and that while the earlier law had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, the new provision has a “freezing effect”. 

Going further, he spells out what the deliberate misuse of this provision means for the future of freedom of speech in India: 

“Try and imagine any journalist or anybody in a panel discussion on television or otherwise having the courage to be critical of anything to do with any policy of the Government of India. Somebody can misinterpret it and bring national security into play, and the police can take cognisance and summon the alleged offender. Freedom of speech can be bulldozed or demolished because one individual out of a billion anywhere in the country believes (without evidence) that national security is in danger or that the armed forces are demoralised or that dissent is ‘strategic subversion’ undermining the sovereignty and the integrity of India.” (Emphasis added)

This then is the future we are looking at in India as far as freedom of the press is concerned. 

Independence Day is a reminder to ask the questions EC isn’t answering

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on August 13, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/13/independence-day-a-reminder-to-ask-the-questions-ec-isnt-answering

As the week leading up to India’s 79th Independence Day dawned, the condition of stray dogs in the country’s national capital made the top headlines following a ruling by the Supreme Court. While the fact of the highest court in the land addressing this issue is certainly unusual, one can question whether the story merited the page one lead in some English language newspapers.

Also, was it more important than the growing clamour by Opposition parties about discrepancies in voters’ lists? All Opposition members in Parliament staged a protest on August 11 as they marched to the office of the Election Commission but were stopped from proceeding by the Delhi police. Surely, in the context of India’s democracy and on the eve of its Independence Day, this merited more attention.

In many ways, this juxtaposition of two stories, one relating to the future of stray dogs in New Delhi, and the other relating to the future of electoral democracy in India, reflects media priorities in India of 2025.  The former will appeal to the “market” to which the media caters. The latter, if pursued and highlighted by mainstream media is likely to draw the ire of the party in power and be viewed as being pro-Opposition. 

 The issue of discrepancies in voters’ list became a topic for discussion after the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, held a press conference on August 7 presenting a detailed survey of one parliamentary constituency, Mahadevapura in Bengaluru. 

Since Rahul Gandhi’s press conference, several independent platforms and a couple of mainstream channels have followed up. But overall, national newspapers have stuck to reporting the “claims” made by Rahul Gandhi and the various protests but not done their own follow-up investigations.

The investigation by a team in the Congress suggested, based on the official data of the Election Commission, that in that one constituency questions could be raised about over 1 lakh registered voters. The voters list of Mahadevapura included duplicate votes, that is one person with more than one voter ID, unverifiable addresses, many voters registered at a single address (such as a brewery), voter IDs without photos, and voters registered as new voters who were older than the norm for such registrations.

Some newspapers took the investigation seriously enough to make an editorial comment.  The most nuanced of these was in The Hindu. Even as it acknowledged the importance of Rahul Gandhi’s presentation, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about electoral outcomes from these revelations without sufficient proof. At the same time, it emphasised that the Election Commission needed to respond to the revelations rather than casting aspersions on the motives of the person, or the party, that had done this. The editorial concluded:

“The ECI must embrace the principle that democratic institutions grow stronger through scrutiny. The alternative — continued erosion of confidence in electoral processes — poses far greater risks to democratic governance than any specific allegation of malpractice.”

The Indian Express, on the other hand, a newspaper that had done an excellent investigation into the way the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was being conducted in Bihar, chose to focus on Rahul Gandhi, calling the campaign of “Vote Chori” (vote theft) “self-serving and fraught”. Only in the last paragraph did it mildly criticise the EC for its “peeved responses”. 

Since Rahul Gandhi’s press conference, several independent platforms and a couple of mainstream channels have followed up. But overall, national newspapers have stuck to reporting the “claims” made by Rahul Gandhi and the various protests but not done their own follow-up investigations.

Meanwhile, even without the resources available to the big media houses, independent media journalists have been working and digging out information that suggests that the problem exposed in Mahadevapura is far more widespread. It calls for serious questioning of how an independent, constitutional body like the Election Commission updates voters’ lists.

On this issue, one of the first to raise the alarm was The News Minute which reported as far back as November 2022 how a non-governmental organisation called Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Institute claimed it had authorisation to collect information from voters to update voters’ lists in Bengaluru.

The story is worth revisiting now in the light of the discussion on voters’ lists as it suggests that there could have been other such interventions that were not detected or challenged and therefore not reported.

Also, in this last week, while little appeared in national newspapers, AltNews was already putting out information that mirrored some of what the Congress’s investigation revealed. For instance, it found from the official EC data that six duplicate voter ID cards were issued to the same person, Sushama Gupta from the same constituency, Palghar in Maharashtra.

A Newslaundry investigation of three Lok Sabha seats earlier this year had pointed to gaps in the way revisions were made and verified. In Bihar, a report on Kaupa village in Bihar’s Rohtas constituency revealed that several voters, listed as living in the same house, aged between 26 and 28 years, had either their own name, or the name of their father or husband as just a full stop. How has this happened when the state is going through an intensive revision of electoral rolls, and this information was gathered from the draft revised list published by the EC?

Also read this detailed investigation by the Reporters’ Collective. It found that more than 1,000 new voters registered in Valmikinagar in Bihar following the revision of electoral votes were also registered as voters in Uttar Pradesh. According to the report: “For more than 1,000 cases, we found perfect matches: Names of the voter, their ages and their listed relatives (a mandatory field in the ECI database) were exactly the same across the databases of the two states. Only, their addresses were different.”

Apart from the discrepancies in voters’ lists, in the last few years, attention has been drawn to a mismatch between votes polled and votes counted after an election. One of the first to expose this was independent journalist Poonam Agarwal, who noticed this in a constituency in Madhya Pradesh in 2018. Since then, she has persisted with the story, right up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. 

In an interview to Article-14, she describes the hurdles she has faced to expose the discrepancies between the votes polled and the votes counted after an election. She says:

“When I first started working on stories about a mismatch between votes polled and votes counted, I asked the EC questions about this mismatch. Rather than answering my questions, they removed the data from their website. I found the EC’s response very odd—not normal at all. Earlier, politicians across party lines had a sense of trust in the Election Commission and believed that whatever it did, it did with full transparency. But since 2019, and especially after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, there has been growing distrust of the EC among both politicians and the public.”

It is evident from the reports that have already appeared, that the expose by the Congress, irrespective of its claims that this represents stolen votes, is a big story, one that is worth pursuing by the media.

If the EC had addressed these queries and discrepancies, it is possible that the story would have died down. But when an independent body like the Election Commission stonewalls, or prevents data from being accessed, or refuses to publish data (such as the list of the 65 lakh voters who have been held ineligible in Bihar following the SIR), we must ask why? Did it not know that there were such discrepancies? If not, why not? Did it know but chose to ignore them? If so, why? Or is there another reason?

These are perfectly legitimate questions that voters, and the media, should ask of the EC and what better time than when we are celebrating and talking about freedom and independence. 

 

What Bihar voter roll row reveals about journalism and India

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 11, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/07/11/what-bihar-voter-roll-row-reveals-about-journalism-and-india

 

If you are a newspaper reader in India, you would not have missed the biggest story that has dominated news space at least in one major national newspaper. The Indian Express has led the way by doing a special series “What will NOT count in Bihar” by taking a close look at the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that is currently being conducted by the Election Commission (EC) in the state where assembly elections are due in November.

I have qualified this statement by saying “if” you are a newspaper reader, knowing fully well that the number of people who pick up a physical newspaper and read it is steadily declining in this country.

The SIR has been challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it excludes people, mostly poor, who cannot produce one of the 11 documents demanded by the EC. On July 10, a two-judge vacation bench of the court refused to stay the process underway but suggested to the EC that it include three documents that have been excluded from the list of 11 – Aadhaar card, election ID (that has been issued by the very same EC conducting the revision) and ration card (yes, these still exist).

This column will not argue the rights and wrongs of the process underway. That will be addressed later this month by the Supreme Court. Instead, I want to focus on the print media’s coverage. Do note that it is exclusively print media as our TV news channels as always are preoccupied with other issues.

The Indian Express has done the most extensive coverage although now that this has become such a talking point, and been taken by the apex court, other newspapers have followed. The Hindu had flagged the problems posed by the SIR and has published several follow-up stories like this one. 

Looking at the ground reports, analysis, backgrounders and opinion pieces that The Indian Express has published in recent days, there are several facts about the “real” India that shout out to a discerning reader.

For instance, one of the documents that the EC requires to determine whether you qualify as a voter in Bihar is a birth certificate. You would think that in the year 2025, when our leaders boast to anyone willing to listen that India is making rapid progress on all fronts, this would not be a problem. Yet in 2007, the year that people who are 18 now and would qualify as voters, only 26.2 per cent of people in Bihar had birth certificates. In other words, almost two-thirds of potential new voters would be excluded if this was the only criteria. 

You could still qualify if you had a passport. But barely 2 percent of people in Bihar have passports. Or if you had a school-leaving certificate. According to the 2011 census, only 23 percent of people in Bihar have completed high school. 

Each of these facts ought to be triggers for follow up stories. Why is it so difficult to get a birth certificate? Why is basic education still a distant dream in the second largest state in India? 

Even as these facts emerged, buried in the stories about the revision of electoral lists, another story was prominently displayed in many newspapers.

Apparently, the World Bank has concluded, in a recent report, that India is one of the most “equal” societies in the world and is ranked fourth in the world. Although economists have torn apart the basis for this conclusion, it is ironic that this story was displayed prominently in newspapers without too much discussion even as the facts, stated above, about Bihar were emerging. 

Incidentally, the fact-checking site AltNews has exposed how this story, based on a press release sent out by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), misrepresented the actual World Bank report.  This is indicative of the blind reproduction of government press releases by the media without doing their own due diligence.

In any case, you would need to be a journalist who keeps her eyes firmly shut if you bought into reports about India being one of the most equal societies. You don’t even need to step out of the comfort of a metropolitan city to realise how far that is from the truth.  

Read this story by Sabah Virani in Hindustan Times about one municipal ward in India’s richest city, Mumbai. It tells you how a garbage dumping ground continues to be the site where the poor are dumped. Not just today, but for decades. And yet the media in the “city that never sleeps” apparently rarely stirs to recognise that this too is Mumbai. 

Then take another boast, that of “Digital India”. There is no question that India has made great progress. Mobile connectivity is extensive, payment through digital platforms has taken off in a big way. But still, there are islands of disconnect that coincide with those that also face developmental neglect. The reporting on the SIR has exposed this because a newspaper has given space to such stories. 

Some of Santosh Singh’s reports in Indian Express on the SIR have been especially interesting. He spent a day and a night with one Booth Level Officer (BLO) tasked with collecting documents and data and uploading them on the EC app.  

The BLO the reporter followed is a 49-year-old schoolteacher. As he struggles to connect, he tells Singh, “The app rarely opens during the day and the internet slows down at night. The officers tell us to go where the network is good. Kya pahad par chadhun (Should I climb a mountain?” It takes him 20 minutes to upload the first of the 60 forms that he has. He manages to upload just 30 of the 60 by 2.15 am, having started at 10 pm after a day of collecting forms from individuals.

This graphic description of the process, and the reality it reminds us of, is the real back story of the SIR. Digital India works for those who can connect to this other India, that is apparently making great strides. But the one that cannot, or does so with difficulty, tells us another side of a story that always remains to be told. And that is what the media ought to be doing, did do at one time, and now does only sporadically.

The India that dominates news space is the one that is entitled. There is another India that comes into view, often coinciding with elections, that is starkly different. Any respectable news organisation in this country ought to accept that both are legitimate areas for reporting and coverage. Yet, that these glimmers of the other India emerge so sporadically is a reflection on the state of our media.