India's tipping point

It was a unique disruption. For a nation whose birth witnessed the displacement of 10-12 million on religious lines and the broad-day murder of 1- 2 million, political disruption usually means slaughtering a couple of thousand. But here was an ostracised man, after enduring an 11-year-long defamation campaign, claiming to set off a nuclear bomb in Indian politics with just one presentation.

When Rahul Gandhi began, the tech support's ineptness was palpable. But he kept going. First, he explained the methodology and selection process for his research. Then came the information. The opposition leader in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) told the audience that of the 543 constituencies, his team had chosen one in Karnataka for the audit. This Bangalore Central constituency includes seven Vidhan Sabha (provincial legislative assembly) segments. Out of these seven, six voted for Congress, but in one (Mahadevapura), the BJP outperformed Congress by a whopping 114,000 votes, changing the outcome of the Lok Sabha seat in favour of Modi's party.

He then described the obfuscation tactics of the Indian Election Commission (ECI), which refused to hand over digital or machine-readable voter list data. The seven-foot-tall pile of paper that was given made it impossible to use optical character recognition, so it had to be done manually. It took forty of his team members six months to sift through all that data. But the results were stunning.

In one Vidhan Sabha constituency, they found over a hundred thousand irregularities. Of these, 11,965 were duplicate voters, 40,009 had fake or invalid addresses, 10,452 were bulk voters with a single address, 4,132 had fake photos, and 33,692 had abuse of the first-time voter form. Given that Congress lost the Lok Sabha seat by 32,707 votes, the above irregularities could easily have played a part. And then he dropped another bombshell. In the state of Maharashtra, in the five months between the Lok Sabha elections (in which the ruling coalition performed poorly) and the Vidhan Sabha elections (which the ruling coalition swept), 10 million new voters were registered. The election commission was not prepared to share this data.

I believe in Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. So, initially, I was sceptical. But could the election commission act more guiltily? You be the judge. First, it asked Mr Gandhi, who is mononymously called Rahul, to submit an affidavit under a clause that makes the investigation task impossible. Shortly afterwards, it shut down public access to its websites in states where the results are in contention ostensibly to block any further scraping of data. Rahul had already pointed to the undue haste by the ECI to destroy the CCTV footage even though, given today's compression and storage technology, there is no need to do that.

This brought to mind the electronic voting machine case before the Lok Sabha elections, where the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and noted activist lawyers like Bharat Bhushan went to the Indian Supreme Court with the request to manually count the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs — the paper record of each vote). The court rebuffed the idea with extreme prejudice. During the past eleven years, the ECI has actively resisted calls for transparency regarding the election data.

In a democracy, transparency is the linchpin of the system. It is the job of election bodies worldwide to ensure the transparency of their elections. And here you have this active opacity that fights back. So, Rahul was not wrong. With one presentation, he has delegitimised every election held after Modi took over. In the middle of all this, rumours spread that the Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, who recently retired after overseeing the Lok Sabha elections, had fled to Malta. These days, Malta has entered our news cycles, too. But we will discuss that another day.

Understandably, this has caused quite a stir in Indian politics despite the mainstream media, the government and the ECI's incredible efforts to trivialise the matter. When, without identifying the constituency, Rahul announced he would share evidence of electoral malpractice with the public, Modi took Amit Shah to meet the president and hinted at Shah being his successor at a ruling coalition meeting. It is common knowledge that Modi's seat from Varanasi is also in contention, where he lost during the first six rounds and then magically pulled ahead by 152,513 votes in the seventh.

A small election showed that the draconian grip of the Modi-Shah duo was slipping. The elections of the Constitutional Club of India were recently held. This is a club of lawmakers. In it, a BJP candidate who fell out of Modi-Shah's favour managed to defeat another BJP candidate supported by the ruling duo. It is believed that Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and the party's most popular leader after Modi, is making his presence felt. His supporters are openly defying Shah's dictates. Cracks within the coalition are also becoming visible.

As I mentioned in previous pieces, immediately after the Lok Sabha election results, it was claimed that Modi had assured the RSS that he would step down as PM at 75. He turns 75 next month, but despite the Sangh's open signalling, no one expects him to leave just like that. That is why all parties involved will put maximum and unrelenting pressure on the duo to relinquish power.

Rahul is already starting a padayatra (journey by foot) in Bihar. But he has already set a chain of events in motion that will likely lead to a nationwide agitation. It is said that when such agitations occur, the RSS, if it wishes, can choose to participate silently. It happened with Anna Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, after all. No wonder Modi lavished his party's ideological fountainhead (RSS) with high praise in his Independence Day speech.

When Modi came to power, he had many sponsors. Western intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes countries and Mossad thought Congress actively resisted joining the Western camp. Indian billionaires were worried because of their mounting NPA debt liabilities. The Indian intelligence community wanted more autonomy. And the RSS wanted to spread its wings. One by one, Modi has offended all of them. His foreign and economic policies are teetering on the brink of disaster. The system's opacity has grown so much that it resembles what physicists call a black box. On top of that is the drubbing India received in the four-day war with Pakistan.

There is no denying that Indian politics is entering a decisive phase. But life goes on. His surrogates and allies may likely feel the urge to terrorise his critics both at home and abroad. But they should heed this sincere advice: stop the aggression and start covering your tracks while you have time. The endgame will leave you with nothing but pain and regret.