Prem Shankar Jha 
In a preceding article I had highlighted an anomaly in the results of the last three Lok Sabha and assembly elections in Delhi, that had never been seen in previous elections to the Lok Sabha and the assemblies, in the ten sets of general elections held from 1971-72 onwards after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had separated the Lok Sabha from the state elections.
This was that against a maximum change of vote downwards or upwards for any party between consecutive assembly and Lok Sabha elections, of 17%, in the case of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, the drop of its vote between two consecutive assembly and Lok Sabha elections had been 66% and 55%.
A substantial part of this drop can be explained by the AAP’s having fought in only four out of Delhi’s seven parliamentary seats in 2024. But even if it had not left the remaining three seats to the Congress and been able to retain a similar share of the vote in them, its share would at most have been 42% in 2024.
That would still have left an almost 12 percentage point drop between the AAP’s vote share in the 2020 assembly election and in the 2024 Lok Sabha election unexplained, which while still surprising, would not have lifted too many eyebrows.
The 12 percentage point drop would still have been suspicious, but it could have been attributed to the sustained three-year campaign by the BJP to discredit the AAP’s moral credentials by accusing its leaders of the so-called “liquor scam”, and then imprisoning its principal leaders including Arvind Kejriwal himself without bail for periods of up to two years.
But the BJP’s propaganda machine understood the Indian electorate only too well and knew that the mere incarceration would do its intended damage, for it would tap into the instinctive belief instilled by the ruling classes in average human beings since the dawn of time, that where there is smoke, there has to be a fire. So the AAP had to be as dishonest as any other party in the country.
Not entirely surprisingly, none of this ruthlessly planned smear campaign was questioned by the mainstream media. But what is surprising is that the significance of this anomaly did not dawn upon our most respected political analysts either, even after it happened twice in a row.
This was the main reason why nearly all placed the blame for AAP’s defeat this year on the moral decline of the party in the 14 years since it was born. So none of them even raised the possibility that the elections might have been stolen.
They did this in spite of the mounting evidence that was already coming in from the Maharashtra assembly elections that these had been gerrymandered to ensure the BJP’s victory, most probably through the misuse of Form 7 of the Election Commission (EC) – a seemingly innocuous form that simply allows residents of a constituency to inform the EC of deaths and changes of residence within their localities since the previous election.
A damning allegation of this had been provided by Rahul Gandhi in a press conference in mid-February, that Maharashtra had managed to have 1.16 lakh more adults on its voter’s list than the entire adult population of the state, and that while the electorate grew by 32 lakh persons between 2019 and 2014, it had increased by 39 lakh in five months between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections in 2024.
This was not the first accusation of a misuse of Form 7 to reach the EC. The first had come as long ago as on March 8, 2019 and had been filed by no less a significant person than G.K. Dwiwedi, who was chief electoral officer for Andhra Pradesh, ahead of elections in that state.
This was not an unofficial but an official complaint to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, which operates under the Union government’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
In October 2024, Kejriwal had also accused the BJP of falsely reporting thousands of voters as having either relocated or died. Citing the Shahdara constituency as a specific example, he claimed that BJP workers including Vishal Bhardwaj, had signed 11,018 Form 7 applications to delete voters’ names in this constituency.
Kejriwal claimed that an examination of 500 randomly selected deletions had shown that around 70% of the deleted voters were alive and resident in Shahdara, and were therefore eligible to vote.
But this was a single accusation, and by then the world had forgotten about it, so neither the EC nor the BJP responded to his accusation. Instead, the district magistrate of Shahdara was made to deny the report. Since he belonged to an all-India service he could hardly have done anything else.
Whether this indeed happened then or not, there can be little doubt that by the 2024 Lok Sabha and 2025 assembly elections, the alleged overzealousness of BJP workers in applying to have voter names deleted suggests that Form 7 had become a major weapon in the BJP’s armoury of tactics for winning elections.
Coming after the two questions that Gandhi asked the EC and received no answer, someone should have raised the obviously quixotic results of the Maharashtra election, that he had highlighted in parliament and his press conferences, in the mainstream media.
But no one did. After the Delhi results were announced, no one even asked the obvious question that if the AAP lost around 10% of the total vote, amounting to a fifth of its entire support base, how did all of it go only to the BJP? The EC has been silent. Why did it not go to the Congress? After all it was Sheila Dikshit who had given the state 15 years of good governance.
By February 8, Kejriwal’s October 2024 analysis of the alterations in Shahdara voting list had been forgotten, but an exhaustive and perhaps still incomplete post-poll analysis of voters’ lists by the AAP is showing just how far, and with what utter contempt for the political opposition, the BJP has taken the misuse of Form 7.
Sanjay Singh, one of the AAP’s main party organisers, disclosed a small part of its findings on Kapil Sibal’s TV programme, Central Hall. Singh, who had spent four months in jail on PMLA charges before the Supreme Court ordered his release, gave a detailed account of the number of applications for voter deletions that were filed purportedly by BJP workers or supporters in six constituencies.
In Shahdara, Singh confirmed that a single BJP karyakarta (party worker), possibly the same Vishal Bhardwaj, had asked for 11,008 deletions.
In Janakpuri, 24 karyakartas had applied for a total of 4,874 deletions.
At Tughlaqabad, 15 party workers had applied for a total of 2,435 deletions. At booth number 117 in this same constituency, which had a voter list of 1,337 persons, two BJP party workers had applied for a total of 554 deletions!
At Palam, the site of the Delhi airport, nine BJP karyakartas had applied for a total of 1,641 deletions.
At Rajouri Garden, a middle-class neighbourhood in Delhi, six BJP workers had applied for 571 deletions.
At Hari Nagar, four party workers had applied for the deletion of 637 voters from the electoral rolls.
These add up to 21,166 voter deletion applications. If similar applications had taken place in all constituencies, it would mean that almost 2.47 lakh voters may have been at risk of being disfranchised. That amounts to 2.6% of all the votes cast in the election.
So far neither the chief election commissioner nor his deputies have made even a token attempt to explain these glaring discrepancies. In a farewell televised statement, Rajiv Kumar, the outgoing chief election commissioner, gave a detailed description of the balloting process:
“There are 1.05 million [10.5 lakh] polling booths in the country. Each has to be manned by four officials. In all, therefore, between four and five million persons are needed for a nationwide election. These are provided by the state governments. A few days before the elections, all the candidates are called in to review the arrangements and voice their suggestions for change if any.”
These, he implied, are promptly implemented. In every state the officials manage the election process are supplied by the state government and they work in their home states.
He also sought to allay the doubts being expressed with increasing frequency about the sanctity of the electronic voting machines. But what he did not say a word upon was how the EC had dealt with the deluge of Forms 6 and 7 demanding additions to, and deletions from, the voters’ lists.
Nor did Kumar respond to the demands of the opposition that they be allowed to examine the additions and deletions made to the voters’ lists.
So, as the months go by, the suspicion among the poor that their democratic rights have been stolen from them will continue to grow.
Seen in hindsight, it is apparent that the Modi government had begun to look for ways to “influence” the results of Lok Sabha and assembly elections at least as far back as in 2020.
It is now becoming increasingly evident that the Modi government is doing this through a wholesale misuse of the EC’s Form 7.
There is good reason to believe that the BJP has made a wholesale abuse of this privilege granted to voters, to, in essence, steal the elections.
At any rate, till the date of writing, Gandhi has received no explanation for the two questions he raised during his February 7 press conference – a day before results for the Delhi assembly election were announced – and which have been presented above.
None of this could have happened had there been a truly independent EC. Messrs Modi and Shah knew this, so this was where they set their sights first.
The first signal came in 2020 when Ashok Lavasa, an election commissioner since 2018 who had been tipped to become the next chief election commissioner in April 2021, only a year later, suddenly resigned from the EC and took up a job with the Asian Development Bank.
Arun Goel, the second election commissioner, lasted longer, but also resigned equally suddenly in March 2024, reportedly due to irreconcilable differences with the CEC, who by then was none other than Rajiv Kumar.
Modi was able to do this because by then he had found the loophole in the law through which to take over the election system, and thus complete his conversion of a democratic nation into a one-party state.
This was to comply with the Supreme Court’s Baranwal directive to pass a law sanctifying the existing method of choosing the chief justice of India, but with only one small change that the opposition was too weak to prevent. This was the replacement of the chief justice with a minister of the prime minister’s choosing. That gave the government of the day a permanent majority in the choice of the chief election commissioner, and his two deputies.
The EC has tangentially engaged with the charges of the INDIA alliance. Today the distrust this has created can only be allayed by abolishing Form 7 and the recently amended form 7a altogether.
Anyone with an Aadhaar card must have the right to vote wherever he or she is, and whenever he or she wishes to within the specified time period on election day.
What is more, election day should be declared a state or national holiday. It should be left to the voter to decide whether he or she decides to vote or not. Abstention too, it must be remembered, is a form of negative vote that carries a powerful message to political parties and governments.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.
This article was edited to correct the number of deletion applications allegedly made by BJP workers or supporters.