By Suresh Unnithan
This is not an opposition pamphlet. It is a caution to the party that still occupies the Centre. The opposition is on the front foot not because it has become more honest, but because the ruling party’s blunders — and its extra urge to cling to office — have handed it the ground. Bureaucracy and sleeper cells are feeding on that weakness. People posing as friends are leaking information the other side is already using as a weapon. Identify who is a friend and who is only acting as one. Treat the Election Commission storm as a shouting match, and you will turn an institutional wound into a political one.
An investigation by The Indian Express has put on record what the streets had only alleged: the three-member Commission is no longer speaking with one voice. Two Election Commissioners formally objected, at least fourteen times in ten months, to decisions taken in the Commission’s name — voter additions and deletions, changes to Form 6 for first-time voters, and centralisation of the electoral-roll database so that field officers were locked out of the software that decides who may vote. The Chief Election Commissioner did not explain. The Commission says differing views are part of decision-making and that final Special Intensive Revision decisions were unanimous. That line has not closed the file. It has opened a second front facing the ruling party.
SIR was sold as hygiene. Draft rolls have seen names struck off in crores. Cleaning a dirty list is a duty. Doing it in a manner two of three constitutional authorities describe as unauthorised or executed behind their backs is a political choice. The opposition now treats the Chief Election Commissioner as the problem and the other two as witnesses. Demands range from resignation and a court-monitored inquiry to a pause in SIR. Meet that agitation only with party spokesmen, and it will travel from Nirvachan Sadan to the government that selected the present Chief Election Commissioner. Shielding him from the party office is not damage control. It is an advertisement of panic.
A silent constitutional office and a noisy political defence is the worst combination a ruling party can offer. When spokespersons defend the referee, the public does not hear independence. It hears dependence. Trust in the roll is the last common ground left between hostile camps. Surrender it, and every later election is fought under a cloud you yourselves raised.
The deeper failure is older than this week’s investigation. For years India believed this party was bound by ideology, not by the hunger to keep office. That belief has thinned. Men and women once denounced as the face of corruption were later received as assets — given tickets, ministries, even chief ministerships. Arithmetic replaced doctrine. Migratory birds are not bound by the nest. They leave when the weather turns. A cadre party cannot absorb unlimited unconverted arrivals without changing its character. One rotten apple does not sit quietly in the basket. It teaches the rest how to rot.
From that rot come two advantages the opposition is using. First, the bureaucracy has read the ruling party’s desperation. Officials who should have been treated as risks were treated as assets. A constitutional office that must look larger than the government is being defended by the government’s party, while the officer at the centre remains silent. Second, sleeper cells and loud new recruits have found the bridle gone. The parent organisation has had to rebuke the political wing in public more than once. When the ideological parent corrects the child in the open, the child is improvising for survival — and improvisation is what opponents wait for.
People posing as friends are already hedging. Capital is not sentimental. One industrial house is missing from the Leader of the Opposition’s list of “traitors.” Another has deepened its footprint in Congress-run states. The Leader of the Opposition has said in the open that critical information is leaking from inside the establishment and being fashioned into weapons. Sleeper cells do not need to win an election. They only need to keep the ruling party confused about who is feeding the enemy. Gen Z does not vote on the memory of 2013. It asks whether the referee looks honest today.
The BJP should remember a precedent it once wrote. In the last two years of the Manmohan Singh-led UPA, the opposition did not topple the government in one blow. It gathered momentum from the government’s own blunders — paralysis, coalition blackmail, the smell of scams, the sense that power had become the only remaining project. Anna Andolan then did what Citizens for Justice and Peace and a restless Gen Z are beginning to do now: it moved the argument from party offices to the street and made the ruling alliance look like a tired occupant of office. The BJP of that period let the government bleed. The balance tilted, slowly and then suddenly, toward the NDA.
The roles have reversed. The party that harvested UPA’s mistakes is now manufacturing the mistakes. CJP and Gen Z are not Anna Andolan. History does not repeat with the same faces. It repeats with the same physics: a ruling formation that looks powerful and feels confused; an opposition that looks scattered and feels lucky; a public that stops arguing policy and starts arguing legitimacy. The opposition is gaining strength at the cost of the ruling party’s blunders. That is an indictment of the government.
The BJP has a second reason to be cautious. Several of its alliance partners were once UPA partners. They did not cross over because they discovered a new civilisation. They crossed because power is their only real programme. They are not parties of deference. They are parties of the next calculation. Naidu or Nitish, Paswan or Manjhi or Chaudhary — the names change, the instinct does not. At the slightest hint that the BJP is losing its grip, they will desert. A coalition held together only by office cannot survive a crisis in which office itself looks shaky. Those partners will not fall on their swords for a saffron idea they never held. They will measure the exit.
That is the trap. Turncoats, colour-changing bureaucrats, corporates oiling a second door, alliance partners with no doctrine except power, sleeper cells leaking what the opposition then fires back — none of them need the BJP to win the next decade. They need only that it remain desperate enough to keep them close. Desperation is already visible: a silent Chief Election Commissioner and a loud party defence; an ideological parent forced to rebuke its political child.
The window is narrow. Separate the institution from the individual at the centre of the storm. Pause the contested parts of the roll revision until the three commissioners place a common public record before the nation. Stop using spokespersons as a human shield. Identify the real friends. Isolate those acting as friends. Stop the leak.
The last two years of UPA ended because a ruling alliance mistook occupancy of office for command of the public mood. The BJP of today is closer to that mistake than it admits. The opposition is on the front foot because the ruling party put it there. Act before the partners who came only for power decide that power has moved.
*The author is Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Rising Nation’- An English Fortnightly