Jagdeep Chhokar – a Fierce Crusader For Democratic Reforms

Warrior of democracy, fierce crusader, zinda dil dost… Jagdeep Chhokar is being remembered with great love and admiration by people across the country, as innumerable messages of grief pour in after his sudden passing. He was a dear friend and a co-traveller in the right to information movement.

A wonderful human being, Jagdeep was completely dedicated to the cause of preserving democratic norms and institutions. He co-founded the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) in 1999 and resolutely steered it in its uncompromising struggle for electoral reforms.

ADR's petitions in the Supreme Court have led to numerous landmark judgments. In the 2002 Union of India vs ADR case, the apex court upheld people's right to know the criminal, financial and educational backgrounds of candidates standing for Lok Sabha and state assembly elections. The Association regularly analyses these disclosures and publishes reports on them to create voter awareness.

ADR  was the lead petitioner in the electoral bonds case. In 2024, the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme, which had opened the floodgates of unlimited anonymous funding of political parties, on the grounds that it violated voters' right to information.

ADR challenged the law brought by the government to replace the chief justice of India with a Union cabinet minister in the selection committee for the Election Commission (EC).  The Association also filed a petition to make political parties answerable under the Right to Information Act. Both petitions are, unfortunately, languishing in the court.

Jagdeep was leading the efforts on behalf of ADR to challenge the special intensive revision (SIR) in Bihar. Along with taking up the matter in court, in his last few days he addressed many public meetings and the media on the concerns over large-scale exclusions from voter lists and the EC's attempts at concealing vital information on the SIR.

Last month in Bangalore, the very next day after he had a bad fall in which he fractured his shoulder, he gave a scintillating lecture with his arm in a sling!

Jagdeep was intolerant of the attacks on democracy and of the injustice he saw around him. A retired professor of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, he studied law to strengthen his fight for justice.

He was one of the petitioners in challenging the remission given to convicts in the Bilkis Bano case. During the COVID-19 pandemic, deeply disturbed by the distress being faced by migrant workers, who were left with no means to survive during the lockdown and were forced to walk back hundreds of kilometres to their villages, he joined Harsh Mander and me in petitioning the Supreme Court on the matter. The case led to the court directing the Union government and the states to provide ration cards to eight crore unorganised sector workers in the country.

My last meeting with Jagdeep was in June at the recording of a discussion on electoral bonds for the program Jaanne Bhi Do Yaaro at The Wire's studio. He was his usual brilliant, unsparing self, pulling no punches, calling a spade a bloody spade.

Jagdeep Chhokar's passing is a colossal loss for all progressive struggles in the country. He will be deeply missed.

He donated his body to a medical college – as one friend said, from him we could not have expected anything less. May he rest in power.

Anjali Bhardwaj is a transparency and anti-corruption activist associated with the National Campaign for Peoples' Right to Information and the Satark Nagrik Sangathan.

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