Backstory: A Bulldozer Election Machine Being Given the Run of Electoral Field Amidst Media Inertia

The Bihar elections have taken place. The verdict has emerged. Frenetic analyses have been made. And soon, a thick media silence will descend once more over a region built by the mighty Ganga, only to be occasionally interrupted by news reports of bridges falling or boats capsizing. Let’s face it, when there are no elections, Bihar makes it to the national news largely on the strength of its tragedies.

But this is not the time for the journalist who cares about where India is headed, to turn the page on the Bihar results. There is a great deal of unfinished business remaining which demands media attention. Moving on after these Bihar elections as if there is nothing more to say after a “successfully concluded” poll exercise would be a great disservice to the country for two major reasons. 

First, it would mean a failure to recognise the abnormal nature of this poll exercise. It demonstrated as no election has before, that the “the electoral field is no longer level; oversight institutions have been bent into compliance; and executive power operates without real constraint,” as Anand Teltumbde put it in his piece for The Wire. Second, moving on would mean the ruling party’s frankensteinian bulldozer of an election machine with institutional support from the Election Commission, a possible run of the field in the elections to be held between March and May in 2026 in the states of Assam, Bengal, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

There was a time when this election machinery had drawn high praise from political analysts. Innumerable newspaper articles appeared on the sheer scale and depth of its managerial smartness and attention to detail. In 2017, Prashant Jha’s book, How the BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine, noted the manner in which Amit Shah shaped the party’s membership campaign; pushed “training workers, organization elections and the need to ensure social diversity in the organization”; “drew independent feedback on issues that mattered to the electoral, and carved out campaigns and mass contact around it”; and so on and so forth. 

What emerged clearly in these early accounts was that winning elections was the central plank of the BJP’s turbo-charged drive for power. But at that stage, its election machine could still be said to be controlled to some extent by settled electoral norms. Over time, the machinery, thickened with an endless pipeline of cash and driven by the coarse impunity of entrenched power, began to breach the borders of such decencies. It was not just the BJP’s internal election machinery that was now sought to be managed but every institution that oversaw and regulated electioneering in the country, including the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the mainstream media now came to be primed. 

The bulldozer left nothing standing in the space between the party’s ambition and the limits to its impunity. The general election of 2024 may have come as a dampener in this bid, but those results only strengthened the BJP’s resolve to court victory at all costs, no matter what the circumstance. The results in Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi, and now Bihar testify to its success in having achieved this goal.

The rhetoric of admiration that grew around its election winning machinery had two important impacts. One, it made the invincibility of the BJP an attractive proposition for small parties looking to hitch a ride on the mother ship, leading to an aggregation of the NDA coalition. Last time, for instance, Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party fought the election separately. This time it saw the wisdom of aligning with the BJP-led coalition. Ditto, for opportunistic leaders ever-willing to desert their original parties and sign up with the BJP. Two, it provides a pre-emptive cover for dodgy election practices with victory being foretold and even taken for granted. Alert and independent media coverage could have pierced through these elaborate layers of subterfuge and called them out in order to ensure a more informed electorate, but that did not happen.

There were many occasions when media apathy and inertia have let Indian voters down along this highway of deception. The manner in which the Election Commission was reconstituted, with the prime minister and Union home minister being two of the three members comprising the selection panel for Election Commission of India (ECI), was one of them. That was how India got an ECI comprising one suave, crafty kowtower as the leader of this arrangement and designated chief election commissioner, with two lamp posts to place on either side of him, who being lamp posts have unsurprisingly little to say on anything (note how the emergence of any potential Ashok Lavasas have thus been neutralised).

Even as the election in Bihar gained momentum, we had another egregious act: the bonus of Rs 10,000 being made to out in the name of “Mukhamantri Nitish Kumar” to women even as the model code came into play, ensuring that they could vote for the NDA with newly warmed up hearts and minds. While there was some scattered criticism in newspapers of this step, the outrage that could have stopped the flow of cash was not in evidence. What was the excuse for the media to not take it up as an urgent campaign if individuals like Prashant Bhushan could tweet four days before the first phase of the polls: “1.51 Crore women of Bihar have been given 10,000 Rs each in Oct 25 in the run up to the Bihar elections! These payments will continue during the model code of Conduct even while voting is on. This is our money. Is this not a desperate attempt to bribe voters to win? BJP’s stooge ECI will of course do nothing!” 

Sure enough, the chief kowtower and the two lamp posts had nothing to say as the money slipped seamlessly into the bank accounts of these women.

On the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, there was some coverage – and occasional outrage – but largely only in the print and digital media. One can only hope that the media will not take their eyes off this ball, as the present pan-India roll-out of the move progresses. Already interesting data is emerging on how SIR could have potentially changed poll outcomes in Bihar.  

On November 20, both The Times of India and The Indian Express had important stories on this. The latter reported on how NDA was the “dominant force” not only in the seats that recorded the most deletions as part of SIR… but also those that saw the highest additions of new voters. Extremely relevant reports but why on earth were they buried in a back page when they should have been on page one?

§

DPDP Act and its many hypocrisies

Despite the outrage against several provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2025, the Modi government has gone ahead and notified the Rules to the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2025, signaling that it was prepared to ride roughshod over the genuine apprehensions of sections of the public – especially transparency activists and journalists. They fear rightly that the new law would seriously undermine two significant and intertwined rights: the right to freedom of speech and expression and the right to information. 

This is a government that loves to look good before the global community and now has seized upon the opportunity to appear sensitive to “the right to privacy”, as first articulated in the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Anr. vs. Union of India & Ors judgement of 2017. But look closer at the DPDP Act and its governing rules, and the hollowness of its intent stands revealed. In fact, it has weaponised this right for its own purposes of information control. 

Provisions in the DPDP Act and Rules invest the government with a range of powers to capture private data and powers to punish those who seek information for public purposes. Under this legislation, it can restrict the transfer of data by a data fiduciary (defined in the act as any person, organisation, or entity that alone or with others decides the purpose and means of processing personal data), even as it acquires the power to process personal data to enforce “any legal right or claim” in the interests of national sovereignty. 

A statement from Internet Freedom Foundation put it this way, “The DPDP Act, 2023 and its implementing DPDP Rules, 2025, instead of protecting citizens’ data rights, have created new barriers to transparency and individual freedoms.”

Among the ways the Act instrumentalises the “right of privacy” is to hamper the work of journalists who are deemed as “data fiduciaries” under this act and as data fiduciaries are required to take the consent of persons who feature in their investigative stories. Now we have all done investigations over the years. 

Tell me when was the last time a person who stands to be exposed for wrong doing was prepared to provide you with crucial information about themselves? Would Ottavio Quattrocchi, a central figure in Bofors, have willingly agreed to cooperate with an N. Ram or a Chitra Subramanyam, to unearth the scam? Or to take a more recent example, would those who poured money into BJP coffers in the name of electoral bonds have cooperated with Nitin Sethi of the Reporters Collective while he did his important exposes?

This brings us to the heart of journalism which, according to the well known adage, is publishing something that someone does not want printed. So when legislation sets out to punish the journalist for publishing a news report of public interest – deemed under this Act as violating the “right to privacy” – we have to sit up and take note. This was precisely why 21 media organisations, encouraged by the indefatigable work transparency organisations like Satark Nagrik Sangathan and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, submitted a memorandum against the DPDP Act earlier this year, saying that it would end up “criminalising routine reporting” and threaten source confidentiality. 

In other words, journalists whose job it is to collect information of public import will be prevented from doing so because they are not exempted under the proposed rules governing the DPDP Act.

Worse, it also ends up neutralising the power of the Right to Information Act as Aruna Roy and Anjali Bhardwaj and others have pointed out, time and again. Justice A.P. Shah, in a letter to the attorney general for India, succinctly sums up this damage by pointing out how the new Act, by amending Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, replaces the narrowly tailored exemption in its original version with an “overbroad provision for withholding information, and removing the ‘public interest’ override. 

This enables public authorities to deny information simply by classifying it as “personal,” regardless of its public relevance or importance.” It also, Justice Shah points out, nullifies the principle articulated in the original act that information not deniable to parliament or a state legislature shall not be denied to any person. This attempt, he observes, legitimises “information asymmetry between elected representatives and ordinary citizens undermines the principle of an informed citizenry vital for democratic functioning and public accountability.”

In addition, the Act has an opaque and state controlled architecture of punishment for those who violate this law through a DPDP Board that is appointed by the government and has zero autonomy.

The irony is that earlier draft iterations of such a legislation had provided for exceptions of journalistic work and had sought to balance public interest and information deemed “personal”. Those important nuances were quietly removed from the Act that was passed in 2023, and the Rules that were notified on November 14 this year have only cemented the deletions.

§

Readers Write In…

English rulers loved Bankim

George Ninan responds to the Wire piece, ‘Bande Mataram fits the BJP’s agenda but its history is complicated’ (November 3) (Excerpt):

“These are extracts from the book that underpins our national song, Vande Mataram, and the translation from Bangla to English has been made by the highly respected, revered nationalist, freedom fighter, Aurobindo Ghosh. 

“Then,” asked Mohendra, “why is there such a difference between an Englishman and a Mussulman?” ”Take the first,” said Bhavananda, “an Englishman will not run away even from the certainty of death. A Mussulman runs as soon as he perspires and roams in search of a glass of sherbet. Next take this, that the Englishman has tenacity; if he take up a thing he carries it through. “Don’t care is a Mussulman’s motto…Then the last thing is courage. A cannon ball can fall only in one place, not in ten, so there is no necessity for two hundred men to run after one cannon ball. But one cannon ball will send a Mussulman with his whole clan running, while a whole clan of cannon balls will not put even a solitary English man to flight.”

For Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, ‘Mordechai’ had been the Englishman, while ‘Haman’ continues to be the perceived the real threat, even today. Little wonder that Bankim babu's career blossomed. The English rulers must have loved him; subsequent to publishing Anandamath he was ennobled as Rai Bahadur, and a couple of years later declared companion of the most eminent order of the Indian empire.

§

Victim narrative

Amit Kamath, based in Saint Lucia responds to two articles, ‘Why We Did Not Allow Jemimah Rodrigues the Feeling of Triumph She Deserved’ (Nov 2) and ‘Jemimah, You are the Republic’s Pride’ (Nov 4)…

“Both writers attempt to spin a narrative of victimhood and ostracisation for religious minorities in India. However, their false narrative quickly starts to crumble when one notices the religious, ethnic and social diversity in India’s World Cup squad. Furthermore, recognition including that of the prime minister, chief ministers and the accolades and prize money are being showered on all players, regardless of their religion, background or beliefs. 

“To put facts straight - children should not suffer for the sins of their parents. What Jemimah’s father did using Khar Gymkhana to profess fake miracles in the name of religion is unpardonable (videos of his wrong doings are widely available on the internet). Furthermore, a young Jemimah herself appears in those videos which is disturbing.

“While India’s World Cup victory and Jemimah’s performance in the semi-final is no doubt commendable, the two issues are separate and should not be confused. Jemimah is a national icon while her father is not and therefore must face legal and societal consequences for his actions. I appeal to you to review these articles and redact the objectionable sections in them.

§

Her triumph involves us all

Surekha Sawant sends in another viewpoint:

“By not allowing Jemimah Rodrigues the ‘Feeling Of Triumph She Deserved’, we have also robbed ourselves of what we should feel as a nation and a people.

§

Biased piece?

Dr Vandita Bansal has an issue with the piece, ‘I Was Not a “Muslim Commissioner”: Identity Must Never Eclipse Integrity’ (Oct 28):

“This is in reference to the article in self defence by S.Y. Quereshi. The chief election commissioner is supposed to be apolitical. How come he is writing so many pro-Muslim editorial pieces in newspapers? Deeply biased articles. Such articles are for bins. Shame that you are an Indian.”

My response: We find the tone and tenor of your mail problematic. The former chief election commissioner, S.Y. Quraishi, has every right to freedom of speech, especially since he has retired from government service. Also, do take the trouble to spell his name correctly.

§

Delhi pollution: Making farmers the villains

Wire reader, Henry Dante, on Delhi’s pollution…

“It is that time of the year again for the media, politicians, and pundits to talk about severe air pollution in Delhi and blame the farmers and their stubble burning. But I had the following thought. Does anybody remember that during the pandemic, the skies were crystal clear with no pollution and people in Delhi and surrounding states were able to see the distant hills clearly, including the snowcapped Himalayas from some places?   What happened? The farmers didn't stop their farming practices (because if they did, the country would have starved). So, the blame game making the farmers as villains is because it's the easiest thing to do. The farmers don't control the national narrative. The navel gazing upper middle class and the elites control the airwaves and the narrative.  Heaven forbid, but if the real cause is addressed, then these people have to make substantial changes to their lifestyle. So, let's have air conditioned vehicles with good air filters, bunch of air purifiers at our homes and places of work, and let the almighty have mercy on the rest who have to breathe the pollution.”

Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.