Journalists covering the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the early 1990s—including yours truly—had many occasions to savour the biting comments of the then Chief Election Commissioner, T. N. Seshan. These included memorable lines such as, “I eat politicians for breakfast.” Yet alongside such deliberately provocative and cantankerous remarks, Seshan often asserted himself through masterly observations on the true role of the Election Commission, and on his own responsibility as its head.
One comment that repeatedly comes to mind is his characterisation of how electoral frauds are carried out, and the strength of character he believed was required to check them. “I cherish my rigid attention to integrity,” he said, describing his method of countering electoral malpractices. He emphasised that such fraud did not occur merely on polling day, but was part of a carefully planned machination that unfolded over a considerable period of time.
Integrity, T. N. Seshan insisted, was not an abstract virtue but the spine of electoral democracy. Without it, procedure becomes a shell—lawful in appearance, hollow in effect. Three decades after Seshan transformed the Election Commission into a feared and respected constitutional authority, the 2025 Bihar Assembly election offers a sobering counterpoint: an election conducted with meticulous adherence to form, while steadily evacuating its substance.
The Bihar Verdict 2025, a new study report prepared by Vote for Democracy (VFD) and released on January 13, based on an analysis of official data, statutory law, and constitutional provisions, documents how the democratic mandate in Bihar was not overturned in a single moment but quietly redesigned. This was not the story of ballot-box theft or polling-day chaos. It was the story of an electorate reshaped before voting began, monitored selectively during the campaign, and adjusted after the polls closed.
At the centre of the report lies the Election Commission’s decision to initiate a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in June 2025, just months before the election. In a state that has seen continuous roll revision since 2003—and had already completed a Special Summary Revision earlier that year—the timing was extraordinary. More troubling was the absence of recorded reasons, empirical justification, or a transparent methodology.
What the SIR effectively achieved was a reversal of a foundational democratic principle. Instead of presuming inclusion, the burden was shifted onto citizens to prove eligibility. Millions were subjected to a quasi-citizenship verification exercise without legislative sanction, raising grave constitutional concerns under Articles 14, 19, 21, 325, and 326. The law remained intact; its spirit did not.
The numbers are stark. Nearly 66 lakh voters were deleted from the rolls within weeks. Yet only 3.66 lakh were eventually found ineligible. Over 21 lakh deletions occurred in just three days—an administrative impossibility by any reasonable measure. Voters were marked dead in bulk, labelled permanently shifted, or rendered “untraceable” overnight. The “untraceable” category alone rose by more than 800 per cent. Not a single “foreigner” was identified, despite this being one of the stated justifications.
This was not a correction. It was curation.
Even after the election was notified—when voter rolls are meant to be frozen—lakhs of names were added back. The final figures do not reconcile. By the Commission’s own arithmetic, an unexplained surplus of over three lakh voters remains. No independent audit, reconciliation statement, or public explanation has been offered. Mathematics itself appears to have been subordinated to administrative convenience.
The manipulation extended beyond the rolls. Polling booths increased sharply without a corresponding expansion in genuinely remote or marginalised areas. Constituencies were split in violation of contiguity norms. Most tellingly, constituency-wise turnout data—an elementary safeguard—was withheld until counting day, replaced with fragmented district-level figures that made independent verification impossible.
On the ground, the boundary between governance and election administration blurred dangerously. Over 1.8 lakh Jeevika Didis, beneficiaries of state welfare schemes, were deployed as poll volunteers. Opposition parties, meanwhile, averaged barely 1.55 booth agents per polling station, creating structural vulnerabilities that no neutral election authority should have tolerated.
Polling and counting days produced their own set of red flags: CCTV failures, discarded VVPAT slips, unauthorised vehicles near strong rooms, and reports of voters being transported across state lines. But the most disturbing episode came after polling had ended—the now-notorious “midnight hike”. A uniform 0.18 per cent increase in turnout, identical across genders and phases, quietly added over 1.3 lakh votes to the tally. Around twenty constituencies were affected. Twenty-one seats were decided by margins of fewer than fifteen votes. No automatic recount followed.
Seshan had warned that democracy could be weakened without violating a single rule—simply by draining integrity from institutions while leaving their procedures intact. Bihar 2025 demonstrates precisely that danger. This was not an election stolen in the dramatic sense. It was an election administratively redesigned.
The VFD study report establishes with clarity how easily constitutional guarantees can be diluted through discretion, opacity, and silence. When electoral rolls can be rewritten without reasons, data withheld without consequence, and post-poll figures adjusted without scrutiny, universal adult suffrage survives only as a constitutional phrase.
Reflecting on the Seshan era at the Election Commission, Navin Chawla—his successor in the ECI in the late 2000s—wrote in his book Every Vote Counts: The Story of India’s Elections that the history of the Commission would surely mark 1990 as its defining moment. “Before Seshan’s arrival, there were nine Chief Election Commissioners who were barely known to the public at large. They were accomplished civil servants who gradually built up the Commission, though they worked in an atmosphere overshadowed by the executive. Seshan, Chawla observed, was made of sterner stuff. He stamped his authority—and that of the Commission—on the country’s electoral system.” Chawla’s observations must be read alongside Seshan’s own assertion about cherishing his rigid attention to integrity.
Integrity, as Seshan understood, was not optional to democracy. Without it, elections may still be held—but they no longer represent the people’s choice in any meaningful sense. That the meticulously prepared VFD study report has received little media attention is, in itself, another story of compromised integrity.
Read this detailed report on the VFD study published on the Sabrangindia website here. The full study of the VFD is also available on the website.
Really superb.