Opinion: When the umpire will not meet the players, the match itself is in doubt
An opposition trimmed to ten names still cannot get a presidential appointment, and a Dalit leader's question about Tamil Nadu's roll will not go away. Democracy needs a referee who answers.
There is a simple test for any referee: will they meet the players before the match? This week India's opposition, having trimmed its proposed delegation from fifteen names to ten, still waits for a presidential appointment to discuss the Election Commission. In Delhi, a Dalit leader who petitioned the Supreme Court against Tamil Nadu's voter-roll revision asks the question his allies phrase more cautiously: whose victory was built on a roll from which names disappeared?
Periyar taught us to question every authority that demands obedience without reasons. Anna insisted that democracy is not a ritual performed every five years but a daily discipline of accountability. By that measure, the present controversy is not about one form or one schedule. It is about whether the institution that guards the franchise understands the franchise as a right belonging to the poorest citizen, or as a database to be managed from above.
Consider who bears the burden of a revision built around documents, relatives' histories and logical discrepancies. It is never the minister's household. It is the migrant worker whose address changes with the harvest, the Dalit elder whose papers were never properly made, the Adivasi family at the edge of the record, the woman whose name changed with marriage and moved with work. Universal adult franchise was the great levelling promise of this republic: one person, one vote, equal worth. A process that makes the most precarious citizen prove, again and again, that they exist reverses that promise in practice while praising it in speeches.
The Commission says its decisions were unanimous and lawful. Then let it prove the strength of that claim in daylight. Publish the constituency-level record of deletions, restorations and appeals. Publish the legal basis on which a statutory form was altered. Preserve the complete electronic audit trail for judicial and parliamentary scrutiny. Meet the opposition, not as a favour, but as a constitutional duty to the people who will accept or reject the next result.
A roll that cannot be questioned cannot command belief, and a victory counted on such a roll will always be followed by a whisper. The whisper is unfair to winners and losers alike. End it the only honest way: open the books, answer the questions, and remember that in a democracy the umpire serves the game, never the other way round.