India, Aug. 9 -- The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, made serious allegations about the integrity of elections and electoral rolls in the country on Thursday. The Congress has alleged that some prima facie credible discrepancies in electoral rolls in a single assembly segment (Mahadevpura) made a critical difference to overall results in the Lok Sabha constituency of Bangalore Central, which was won by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 polls. He also charged the Election Commission of India (ECI) - one of the most critical constitutional institutions which safeguards the sanctity of democratic competition and hence peaceful transfer of power - of colluding with the ruling dispensation. What is one to make of these allegations? Three things can be said. This is neither the first nor the last allegation of electoral rigging in India via various forms. These allegations are more likely to be levelled against a hegemonic political party that is difficult to dislodge from power. The Left Front and the Trinamool Congress in pre- and post-2011 West Bengal, Lalu Prasad Yadav's rule in Bihar in the 1990s - which brought the TN-Seshan-led ECI in direct conflict with the Bihar government - the BJP's allegations of rigged EVMs after its defeat in the 2009 elections, and the Congress's string of allegations against the BJP in the post-2019 period are some such instances. In many cases, the parties accused of such rigging eventually lost power, which suggests that even if there were irregularities, it was never strong enough to permanently subvert democratic sentiments. If one were to confine the argument to unscrupulously engineered electoral rolls - which is what Gandhi is alleging now - there is good reason to believe that these were never an epitome of integrity in the past. A data analysis in this newspaper found that the number of registered voters often exceeded the number of adults of voting age in the country (as seen in the census) in many past elections. All this, however, does not mean that Gandhi's allegations should be summarily dismissed. This is because the core of his demand is that ECI be more upfront and cooperative in sharing information about the electoral rolls, and their translation to actual voting, with political parties. While one might have to look carefully at the fine print of laws and rules vis-a-vis the mechanism of ECI sharing information with political parties, in principle, there is nothing wrong in raising such a demand. India has almost one billion voters now, and it is impractical to expect political parties to ascertain the integrity of electoral rolls without resorting to machine-based tools. ECI has to provide machine-readable electoral rolls for this to happen. The longer ECI stonewalls this demand, the more it will hurt its credibility. This brings us to the final point. Even if one were to accept, for the sake of argument, that political actors do try to contaminate electoral rolls to influence results - such allegations go back a long time in India - the question is: Can something be done at a systemic level to prevent this from happening? Regions with a contested history of migration such as Assam have had long spells of unrest over these issues, which in turn led to controversial moves such as the National Register of Citizens. In such instances, allegations about the lack of integrity of electoral rolls triggered mass unrest and often divisive and violent agitations, indicating that there was organic traction, justified or not, in the belief of large-scale vote tampering. Recent allegations about tampering have seen no such mass unrest, which suggests that they might not be as large in scale. Be that as it may, can ECI and the system as a whole do something about making electoral rolls more robust and immune to malfeasance? This is the proverbial elephant in the room. Should we move towards linking electoral rolls to other databases such as Aadhaar, which, theoretically, make it possible to eliminate discrepancies such as multiple entries for the same person or even prevent the same person voting more than once? Many voices driven by privacy concerns have opposed such moves, and there is some merit in their concerns about all this emboldening a larger surveillance State. However, it is also worth asking whether we are only protecting privacy on a de-jure basis while it is being blatantly violated by State and non-State actors colluding with each other to subvert it in a de-facto manner. Another option could be to resort to processes such as electoral-roll additions or deletions requiring mandatory approval of designated representatives of recognised political parties. As will be obvious to the discerning reader, neither of these processes can be deemed foolproof. The choice, as is always the case while making large databases, will be between wrongful inclusion and wrongful exclusion. The Opposition, with its attacks about fake voters, is emphasising wrongful inclusion. But, it is also protesting possible wrongful exclusion by opposing the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, presently ongoing in Bihar. Logically, one cannot minimise one without letting the other increase. In an ideal world, ECI should have been a non-partisan body, making both the ruling party and Opposition realise the inherent tension between the concerns of wrong inclusion and exclusion in electoral rolls. But realpolitik and institutional propriety crossed the Rubicon of this ideal a long time ago, and it is condemned to veer towards the banks of one echo chamber or another....