How the Election Commission has damaged faith in Indian democracy

San Francisco : In her landmark study, ‘Why Electoral Integrity Matters’, political scientist Pippa Norris offers a foundational insight into what makes elections legitimate. An election, she argues, is not a single event but a sequential chain — 11 links, stretching from drawing of constituency boundaries and compilation of voter rolls, through campaign conduct, to counting of ballots and acceptance of results.
Violate standards at any one link, and the chain weakens. But Norris identifies something even more corrosive than individual violations. When rules of the electoral game are set unilaterally by the very actors who stand to gain from them, the entire premise of democratic competition collapses. Elections cease being the mechanism by which power is contested and become the mechanism by which power becomes entrenched. Today, India is failing this test, not only in the conduct of elections but in its architecture as well.