India’s opposition parties say the country’s elections are being rigged, challenging the election institute. Their members of parliament plan to march to the Election Commission, the agency that runs India’s elections and is supposed to act as a neutral referee. Their slogan is “vote chori,” Hindi for vote theft. They want the head of the Commission, Gyanesh Kumar, removed, supporting to go back to paper ballots instead of voting machines.

Prime Minister Modi’s party, the BJP, says the opposition is just making excuses for losing. One minister called the protests “an advance excuse for poll defeats.” However, nobody has proven that votes were stolen. But India has removed the checks that are supposed to keep that referee neutral. By the definitions of democracy from the start of this course, that alone is a step backward, whether any votes were stolen.

Why a voter list is a big deal

Since June 2025 the Commission has been running a Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a house-to-house recheck of who belongs on the voter rolls. Roughly 130 million names have been removed from draft rolls across 30 states and territories. The Commission says it is clearing out dead, duplicate, relocated and non-citizen voters. The opposition says it is clearing out their voters.

Schumpeter defines democracy as the arrangement “in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (269). If competing for votes is the whole definition, then deciding who gets to cast one is the most powerful job in the system. Dahl’s institutional guarantees include the “right to vote” and “free and fair elections” (3), and he notes that the right to vote in free and fair elections “partakes of both dimensions” of democracy, contestation and inclusiveness (4). So does a roll revision. Take enough of one side’s voters off the list and you shrink participation and tilt the competition in a single move.

Cleanup or purge?

This refers back to our lecture on the “uses and abuses” of democratic institutions. In the reading Ozan Varol describes “stealth authoritarianism” as rulers who “cloak repressive measures under the mask of law.” One mechanism was election rules that disenfranchise the opposition. The catch is that healthy democracies use the same legal tools, so abuse and ordinary use look alike from outside.

India fits that description. Every democracy must update its rolls. India’s Supreme Court upheld the SIR as constitutional in May. In West Bengal, about 9 million names came off the rolls before the BJP won 207 of 294 seats. Even so, one analysis from the National University of Singapore concluded the deletions would not have changed the overall result, though they may have mattered in some close races.

So if the question is “was the election stolen?”, the honest answer is that we can’t tell. There was a discussion in our lecture of whether we risk overreacting to things that only look anti-democratic. So the question should be better approached in this way: Is anyone still in a position to check the Commission’s work?

The key players

In 2023 the Supreme Court said election commissioners should be chosen by the prime minister, the opposition leader and the Chief Justice. Parliament then passed a law swapping the Chief Justice for a cabinet minister picked by the prime minister. The government now holds two of the three votes on who referees its own elections. Kumar is the first chief commissioner chosen this way.

Then, this September, the Indian Express reported that the Commission’s other two members had objected on record at least 14 times in ten months, with one calling a change to the voter registration form “unauthorized and illegal.” The Commission replied that every decision was unanimous and that differing views are a normal part of deliberation. About a week later it opened a special drive letting deleted voters reapply with the standard form.

Stealth authoritarianism is hard to spot in outcomes. It gets easier if you look at who is able to say no. The outside check, a judge on the panel, was removed by law. The inside check, the other commissioners, seems to have been worked around. Once both are gone, a cleanup and a purge look identical, and voters are just asked to trust the result. Schumpeter admitted that the democratic method “shades off into the autocratic one by imperceptible steps” (271). This looks like one of those steps.

The opposition isn’t off the hook

There is an uncomfortable flip side. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warning signs include attempts “to undermine the legitimacy of elections” (23), and they describe populists who say the system has been “hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite” (22). Rahul Gandhi has called the alleged vote theft “treason.” Others have demanded Kumar’s arrest and a rerun of the West Bengal election. That is the rhetoric they warn about.

The difference is in the fine print. Their test is about rejecting “credible” results and accusing rivals “baselessly” (23). When two of three commissioners put their objections in writing, the worry has a basis. Still, the opposition pays a price when its claims outrun its evidence. The documented problem is the voter list, yet the bloc also demands paper ballots, a separate fight about voting machines. That makes the campaign easier to wave off, and it teaches their own voters that no result can be trusted.

What would actually help

The fix worth marching for is a boring one: put a neutral member back on the selection panel and make the Commission’s decisions collective again. Democracy in this course is defined by its procedures, so erosion shows up in procedures before it shows up in results. India’s results may well be legitimate. The process for confirming that is weaker than it was three years ago, and that should worry voters on both sides.