Election Commission refuses to meet protesting MPs outside its office
The Election Commission said a meeting with protesting opposition MPs outside its premises could not be accepted, offering instead to receive their memorandum through its senior-most officer on duty after an eight-hour dharna in New Delhi.
The Election Commission of India on Tuesday refused a request by INDIA bloc MPs to meet the full Commission outside its premises, saying protocol required meetings with political delegations to be held at the Commission's office. The refusal came as opposition MPs, led by Lok Sabha Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, staged a dharna in New Delhi lasting more than eight hours against the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
According to the Commission, the MPs had sought a meeting at a venue outside Nirvachan Sadan. The panel described that demand as unusual and said it could not be accepted. As an alternative, it offered to send its senior-most officer on duty to the proposed venue to receive the MPs' memorandum, a step it characterised as unprecedented. The protesting leaders declined that offer and continued their sit-in.
The standoff is the latest turn in a week of escalating confrontation over the roll revision. Opposition parties allege that the Special Intensive Revision risks deleting genuine voters and shifting the burden of proving eligibility onto the poor, migrant workers and minorities. The Commission has maintained that the exercise is a clean-up meant to remove duplicate, deceased and ineligible entries, and has extended deadlines and directed officials to register voters who were left out.
What Tuesday exposed was narrower than the revision itself and, in its own way, more basic. A constitutional body asked to hear elected representatives chose to argue about the room. Protocol governs where meetings happen; it does not answer the question the MPs carried to the gate, which is whether citizens who have voted all their lives will find their names on the list when they next arrive to vote.
The Commission's offer to receive a memorandum through an officer keeps the file moving while keeping the Commissioners themselves at a distance. For voters watching the argument over venues, the distinction will matter less than the roll. A franchise that survives paperwork only for those who can prove it twice is not a franchise enjoyed equally, and that is the charge the eight-hour dharna was staged to press.