Post-independence India’s major institutions of governance are in a deplorable condition of disarray. The two houses of Parliament at the Centre and legislative assemblies in the states are routinely disrupted without orderly debate (see Editorial p.12); the judiciary, groaning under obsolete procedural laws and a 50 million cases backlog is dysfunctional; the bureaucracy shows no sign of reducing compliances and filings; India’s universities continue to recklessly certify 10 million under-prepared, unemployable graduates annually.

To this dismaying list add the Election Commission of India, which has either lost its independence or its bearings. A Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls of the benighted heartland state of Bihar (pop.134 million) which goes to the assembly polls in November has revealed that 6.5 million registered voter names — equal to almost 10 percent of the electorate — have vanished from the list of previously registered voters.

As perhaps every voter-citizen has experienced, the root cause of the huge disorder in the electoral rolls in which names, ages, addresses are routinely mangled beyond recognition, is that barely literate government school teachers and unemployed graduates are hired by state Election Commissions to conduct pre-poll SIRs. Moreover these personnel are remunerated on piece work rather than time expended contracts. As a result they are tempted to enter duplicate and cluster voters. Constructive criticism requires these admin and supervisory problems to be brought to the notice of ECI.

Instead, opposition Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and sidekick Jairam Ramesh are going to town accusing ECI of mass-scale cheating, eroding public faith in this critically important institution. Moreover RaGa’s frequent use of street vulgarisms such as chor, liar, anti-national etc has coarsened the national discourse and brought constitutionally elected leaders and institutions into disrepute. Such language is accelerating the erosion of critically important national institutions of governance.