Opinion: An umpire who will not come to the boundary

Every democracy keeps one official who is not supposed to have a side. In India that trust sits with the Election Commission, the umpire whose only constituency is the voter. This week the umpire told elected MPs who had marched to its gate, sat on the road for eight hours and asked to be heard, that the meeting could not happen where they stood. Come to our office, the Commission said in effect, or leave the memorandum with the senior-most officer on duty.

Protocol is not a trivial thing. Institutions need rules for who enters, who speaks and where papers are received. But protocol becomes something else when it is the whole answer. The MPs had not arrived to quarrel about furniture. They carried a charge that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is deleting citizens who cannot twice prove what a lifetime of residence already proves. To that charge, the Commission offered geography.

Periyar warned that a system can keep every form and still lose its soul, that respectability is often the costume power wears when it does not wish to argue. Ambedkar, who gave the Election Commission its constitutional shelter, understood the same danger from the other side: independence is not distance from the people. It is distance from the government of the day, maintained precisely so that the people's complaint can travel upward without begging permission at each floor.

A memorandum accepted by an officer is a file opened. A Commission that hears a delegation is an institution answering. The difference is not courtesy. When voters believe their names can be removed by procedure and restored only by ordeal, the cost is paid before polling day, in the queue that decides not to form. The Commission cannot repair that belief from behind a protocol note.

The remedy costs nothing but willingness. Publish, booth by booth, who was deleted and why, in language the deleted can read. Hear representative delegations wherever they lawfully assemble, and answer on the record. Accept that the umpire's authority rests not on the office it defends but on the voter who trusts it. An umpire who will not come to the boundary when the players dispute the score has not preserved neutrality. He has vacated the field.